Associate Director, Global Public Affairs, Luskin School of Public AffairsUniversity of California, Los Angeles
Stephen Commins is the Associate Director for Global Public Affairs and Lecturer in Urban Planning at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA. He currently works as a partnership adviser for World Development Report 2017 (Governance and the Law) and also worked on World Development Report 2015 (Mind, Society and Behavior). He recently completed a four country study of World Bank CDD programs and their impact on livelihoods in FCAS situations, in South Asia, and a project on 'cities, violence and order' with IDS/Sussex.
Commins worked for seven years as the Senior Human Development Specialist in the Human Development Network at the World Bank and was a member of the World Development Report 2004 team (Making Services Work for Poor People). He currently is an adviser to the Secure Livelihoods Resource Consortium (Overseas Development Institute). Prior to his work at the World Bank, he was Director of the Development Institute at the UCLA African Studies Center in the 1980s and Director of Policy and Planning at World Vision International in much of the 1990s.
His recent work has focused on fragile states, disasters, and basic service delivery, particularly in the health sector. Recent papers include “Non-State Providers, the State and Health in Post-Conflict Fragile States”, “The Medium-Term Impact of Disasters in Bangladesh”, and “Decentralization and Accountability in Africa", and a chapter in a book on conflict and health. As a consultant for DFID, he managed a small team that reviewed 20 'pooled funds' and produced a policy guidance and program management guide for managers in FCAS.