The department is a lively community that is recognised internationally as one of the top centres for research and teaching in development studies.

Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
This paper seeks to open the “black box” of how global crises such as the global financial crisis lead to change in global governance institutions. It finds that current approaches to institutional design and crises are inadequate in explaining change under crisis conditions as they fail to take into account the centrality of uncertainty by reducing it to risk. Therefore, it draws on complexity theory and collective intentionality to develop the concept of crisis by focusing on causal and ontological uncertainty. It then combines them to propose a dynamic sequential model that traces the causal chain of crisis-induced pressure on global institutions and outlines a set of conditions that make successful crisis management more likely. Finally, the model is applied empirically to the diplomacy of the global financial crisis and to the adjustments made to international financial institutions during the crisis management period. Overall this article demonstrates that understanding the exact causal pathways and conditions under which crises can drive change in global governance is a promising research area.