Department of International Development King’s College London
(DID)
Introduction
The King’s International Development Institute (IDI) was formally launched in autumn 2013 by the Vice-Principal for Arts and Sciences. We were invited to become a department in the summer of 2016, and became the Department of International Development. The DID has five research clusters and teaching programmes at all levels. Our students over the last 2 years have come from 50 countries and half of all our students have been international students.
Mission
The department is an innovative and contemporary development studies institute. Our focus is on the middle-income developing countries or ‘emerging economies’, meaning the fast growing economies of the developing world where foreign aid is largely irrelevant. The approach taken is one of studying context and actual economic, social and political change in middle-income countries rather than prescriptive models of development. The department has regional expertise on Latin America and East/Southeast Asia. The mission is to explore the sources of success in emerging economies as well as understand the major development challenges they continue to face.
Research
Research in the department seeks to explore two key poles of development: inclusive development, i.e. the policies, politics and economics of ensuring that the broad population share in the benefits of growth and wealth; and national development, i.e. the policies, politics and economics of promoting and sustaining economic growth. Under these broad areas the research of the Institute¹s staff focuses around the DID research clusters. These research clusters contribute to an understanding of the larger, unifying question of how economies/societies move from lower-value added, less durable and less inclusive modes of economic and political organization to higher value-added, durable, and broadly inclusive modes. Read more about our Research.