Dr Claire Mcloughlin

• PhD in political sociology, University of Birmingham, 2017
• MA International Relations and World Order, University of Leicester
• BA History and Politics, University of Leicester

Claire Mcloughlin is Associate Professor of Politics and Development in the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. She is lead editor of the widely adopted textbook The Politics of Development (SAGE, 2024), which has become a core teaching text across universities internationally. With over 15 years’ experience spanning academia, policy engagement, and advisory work with international development agencies, she is recognised for shaping debates at the intersection of politics, governance, and service delivery in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.

Her research focuses on the political economy of public service delivery, state legitimacy, and governance in crisis-affected settings. She has led major collaborative research programmes with international organisations, including the World Bank, translating political economy insights into operational guidance for development practitioners. Her work has been published in leading journals such as World Development, Governance, Public Administration and Development, and Development in Practice.

Claire previously served as Director of Research at the Developmental Leadership Program (2018–2023), an international research initiative examining how political processes shape development outcomes across the Asia-Pacific. She currently serves as Deputy Director of Education in the School of Government at Birmingham and is an elected member of the Council of the Development Studies Association. She also founded the University’s first undergraduate programmes in International Development, reflecting her longstanding commitment to advancing innovative teaching in the field.

Claire contributes to teaching in the following areas:

• Governance and state-building
• Making policy
• Development management
• Critical approaches to development

Public services, state (de-)legitimation, the politics of public goods distribution

• The politics of public goods
• State legitimation
• Co-production and collective action beyond the state

Claire is a political sociologist whose research focuses on development, governance, and the political economy of public service delivery in fragile, conflict-affected, and divided societies. She examines how power, institutions, and political incentives shape who receives services, how they are delivered, and with what consequences for legitimacy, accountability, and social order. Her work pays particular attention to distributive politics, procedural fairness, and the historical and institutional processes through which welfare provision becomes embedded in political settlements and evolving social contracts.

She has published widely on when and how service delivery influences processes of state legitimation and de-legitimation, and on the governance dynamics that mediate these effects. A central strand of her current research examines service delivery in protracted crisis settings, analysing how delivery systems function under conditions of violence, institutional fragmentation, and uncertainty, and how external actors can support effective, non-harmful, and durable provision. Claire currently leads and collaborates on research programmes examining the politics of development and reform, and serves on the editorial board of Governance.