Alina Rocha Menocal

Originally from Mexico, Alina is a Senior Research Fellow in the Politics and Governance Programme at the Overseas Development Institute, a leading think tank on international development based in the UK.  She is also a Senior Democracy Fellow on Applied Political Economy at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).  Alina’s areas of expertise include democratisation, linkages between state and society, processes of institutional transformation, and peace-and-state building processes in comparative perspective. Over the past fifteen years, she has been involved in a series of projects and assignments that seek to bridge the gap between research and policy in thinking about governance, as well as to inform more effective engagement and ways of working among international development actors in developing country settings. Alina has done extensive work on political economy, and on how the international development community can think and work in more politically aware ways, through both the Thinking and Working Community of Practice, of which she is a founding member, and other fora. Alina has written extensively on these different themes in both academic and policy oriented publications, and she has authored numerous reports for donors on many of these issues. She is a frequent commentator on different platforms, and engages with government officials and elected representatives on a regular basis to share evidence from her research and provide strategic advice. She holds a BA from Yale University and an MPhil from Columbia University, both in political science.