Home > Academics > Concentrations > EPD
Economic and Political Development (EPD)
Letter from the Director
Despite the stunning pace of technological progress and high economic growth rates in some parts of the world, we continue to live with growing inequalities and large amounts of poverty. Roughly a billion people live under the World Bank’s dollar a day marker of extreme poverty and roughly a billion more live with double that meager amount. UNICEF tells us that every year ten million children die before age five from preventable diseases and in many parts of the globe, persistent violence, institutional instability and environmental degradation create complex poverty traps that condemn many to lives that are “nasty, brutish and short”. How to transform this morally unacceptable situation through effective practice and policies at global, national and local levels remains one of the greatest challenges of our time.
The Economic and Political Development (EPD) concentration attracts diverse students from around the world who are dedicated to the eradication of poverty and its causes and the expansion of human development in the form of expanded capabilities and freedoms. At EPD we recognize that no silver bullet or simple solution exists to the human development challenges we face. Our approach is to provide students with a strong historically grounded awareness of the shifting trends and ideas in development and of track records of projects and policies. The idea is to equip EPD students with a critical analytical orientation to the practice of development and strong insights into successes that can be built upon through advocacy and key skills like Policy Analysis and Monitoring and Evaluation.
At EPD, we encourage creativity and trespass of disciplinary boundaries by having our students choose a professional focus that can combine coursework across concentrations and programs such as Human Rights, Humanitarian Affairs or International Economic Policy. Finally, we strongly believe in applying what is learned in the classroom to the world through public service in our own neighborhood, internships, policy projects and applied workshops. Through these avenues our students engage with a wide variety of actors in the world of development from small NGOs, social movements and socially responsible businesses to government agencies, consulting firms, development banks, policy institutes, the UN and World Bank. In the process we develop close links between the university and the world of practice and this generates mutually beneficial circulation of ideas and approaches and grounds theoretical coursework in the world of action.
I encourage you to join us in the lively development dialogue and debates at EPD!
Jacqueline M. Klopp
Interim Director