The Legal Path to Sustainable Development: Module 8 

Michael Woolcock is Lead Social Scientist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group, where he was worked since 1998. For sixteen of these years he has also been a (part-time) Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. His current research focuses on strategies for enhancing state capability for policy implementation, on using mixed methods to assess the effectiveness of ‘complex’ interventions, and the future of multilateralism and global development. In addition to more than 100 journal articles and book chapters, he is the co-author or co-editor of ten books, including Legal Pluralism and Development Policy: Scholars and Practitioners in Dialogue (edited, with Brian Tamanaha and Caroline Sage; Cambridge University Press 2012), Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action (with Matt Andrews and Lant Pritchett; Oxford University Press 2017) and, most recently, the World Bank’s biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2020: Reversals of Fortune (with Samuel Freije-Rodriguez et al; World Bank 2020). He was also co-founder of the World Bank’s global ‘Justice for the Poor’ program, which operated in a dozen countries in Asia, Africa and the Pacific from 2002-2017. An Australian national, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Queensland, and has an MA and PhD in comparative-historical sociology from Brown University.

Sarah Bracking is a Professor in the School of Global Affairs, King’s College London and formally Senior Professor (SARCHi) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa.