Dr. Danielle Resnick is a Senior Research Fellow and Governance Theme Leader at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and leads the CGIAR’s Policies Institutions and Markets research on Political Economy of Policy Processes. Between 2010-2013, she was a Research Fellow at the United Nations University – World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in Helsinki, Finland. She is a political scientist who focuses on the political economy of development, decentralization, urban governance, tax mobilization, political parties, and democratization. Her regional focus is sub-Saharan Africa, and she has conducted fieldwork in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, and Zambia.
She is co-editor of Ghana’s Economic and Agricultural Transformation (Oxford University Press), the author of Urban poverty and party populism in African democracies (Cambridge University Press), co-editor of Democratic trajectories in Africa: Unravelling the impact of foreign aid (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of African youth and the persistence of marginalization: Employment, politics, and prospects for change (Routledge). She currently serves on GAIN’s expert advisory panel on urban food markets and previously belonged to the lead expert group of the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition (GloPan).
She has consulted for Oxford Analytica, Partnership for African Social and Governance Research, and the World Bank and gives briefings on African politics to the Foreign Service Institute and the National Intelligence Council. Her research has been funded by USAID, the International Growth Centre, and the Social Science Research Council.