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Person

Anuradha Joshi

Anuradha Joshi

Director of Research

Anuradha Joshi is Director of Research at IDS. She is also a social scientist with a PhD in Public Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA with extensive experience in policy processes and institutional analysis.

Her core focus is on state-citizen relations, specifically in areas of accountability, collective action, service delivery and bureaucratic behaviour, taking an inter-disciplinary approach to her research. She has researched issues of mobilising ‘demand’ in basic services and in the scaling-up of innovative service delivery approaches in a variety of sectors including poverty programs, basic public services, social protection, forest policy and taxation of the informal economy. Her primary country of interest is India; but she has collaborated with partners on research projects in Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, and Vietnam. She has extensive experience of consulting for bilateral and multilateral agencies and managing large, multi-country research projects. She has also been a member of several international advisory bodies including the Advisory Council for the World Bank Group’s Citizen Engagement Strategy and the International Experts Panel of the Independent Reporting Mechanism (the accountability arm of the Open Government Partnership).

Languages: Hindi, Marathi (fluent). Spanish, Bengali (basic).

Google Scholar
https://goo.gl/PGTRvV

Projects

Project

Youth, affective polarisation and trust: a transnational perspective (YAPT)

Political polarisation is a prominent feature of democratic backsliding around the world and one of the greatest challenges of contemporary governance because it divides society and the electorate into mutually distrustful camps. Particularly undermining trust and democracy is affective polarisation:…

Project

Governance Diaries of the Poor

Background We do not have much understanding of what empowerment and accountability mean to poor people through their lived experiences. In fact, in fragile and conflict-affected settings, especially in areas affected by violent conflict, we have little understandings of how…

Programme & Centres

Programme and centre

Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA)

The Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) international research programme completed in 2022. It explored how social and political action can contribute to empowerment and accountability in settings affected by fragility, conflict, and violence, with a particular focus on Mozambique,…

Programme and centre

Centre for Rising Powers and Global Development

The Centre for Rising Powers and Global Development is at the forefront of research and practical analysis that helps connect governments, donors, civil society, and academia to explore new way to address global development challenges, with a particular focus on…

Programme and centre

Rising Powers in International Development Programme

Poverty reduction in low-income countries is increasingly influenced by the rising powers, a category that includes the BRICS grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, as well as regional powers such as Mexico and Indonesia. Their importance is…

Recent work

Journal Article

Furthering a feminist fiscal agenda: Engendering tax and development

Development Policy Review 43

Taxation has received increasing attention from researchers and in the context of development policy, though less attention has been paid to the gendered impacts of taxation, particularly in lower-income countries. Purpose We seek to understand how taxation affects men and women differently...

Anuradha Joshi
Anuradha Joshi & 2 others

26 March 2025

Working Paper

Engendering Taxation: a Research and Policy Agenda

ICTD Working Paper 186

This paper reviews the existing literature and related debates on gender and tax in lower income countries. It identifies knowledge gaps, and maps broader issues that are relevant for understanding the gendered impact of taxation.

Anuradha Joshi
Anuradha Joshi & 2 others

20 March 2024

Opinion

Durdiner (hard times) Diaries: Updates from the ground

In our Durdiner Diaries project (in Bangla, Hard times diaries), we have been tracking ‘new poor’ households in Bangladesh, studying their experiences of life before, during and after Covid. These are households that were not poor before Covid, but the impact of the pandemic made them...

17 August 2023

Journal Article

Governance Diaries: An Approach to Researching Marginalized People’s Lived Experiences in Difficult Settings

International Journal of Qualitative Methods Vol 22

How do chronically poor and marginalized citizens interact with and make claims to the different public authorities that exist in fragile, conflict and violence-affected contexts? In other words, how does governance from below look like in difficult settings? Given the centrality of the...

2 February 2023

Opinion

Durdin-er Diaries: chronicles of hard times in Bangladesh

Which governance channels do people whose livelihoods and incomes were severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic navigate while attempting to bounce back? Through a joint IDS and BIGD research project we aim to answer this question by exploring the trajectories of recovery, coping strategies,...

27 January 2023

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