September 17, 2014
Global issues increasingly dominate the development agenda, ranging from the challenges of climate change to fighting criminality and health epidemics like the recent Ebola outbreak to the increasing ability of international capital to evade national tax regimes, says Nancy Birdsall, president of the Washington-based Center for Global Development and a former World Bank staffer. But, she adds, making things happen on the ground requires detailed local knowledge of the politics and legal structures of individual countries: "You've got to understand what's happening in Morocco and how that's different from what's happening in Peru."