Development and Welfare Policy in South Asia

Deepta Chopra is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, UK. She focuses on policy processes, and has extensive experience in managing, designing, and understanding social protection and livelihoods programmes. Her work has primarily been on examining policy processes through the formation of a landmark legislation, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), India. Her expertise on state-society interactions has allowed her to engage with issues of power and participation and examine efforts to address poverty and vulnerability from the unique perspective of policy. Her current research interests include a focus on gendered political economy analysis of policies on unpaid care work; the design, implementation, and monitoring of rights-based policies (specifically public works); and policy diffusion of social protection policies across South Asia.Gabriele Koehler is a macroeconomist trained at the universities of Munich, Tübingen, Regensburg, and Ottawa. She worked in senior positions as a development economist with the United Nations at ESCAP, UNCTAD, UNDP, and UNICEF, and has been a visiting fellow with the Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction Team at the Institute of Development Studies, UK. She serves on several advisory boards in the field of international development, and is currently based in Munich as a policy advisor, researcher, and publicist. Her research interests include the development agenda beyond 2015; human rights; employment and decent work; social protection; industrial, trade, and investment policy; and social and economic policy in South and Southeast Asia.