Dan Honig

I'm an assistant professor of international development (IDEV) at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, a member of the Scholars Strategy Network, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Public Policy. My research focuses on the relationship between organizational structure, management practice, and performance in developing country governments and organizations that provide foreign aid. If you're looking for data or info on my 2018 book Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top-Down Control of Foreign Aid Won't Work, scroll down for a description of the work or to download the public Project Performance Database (PPD), to my knowledge the world's largest database of aid project outcomes across multiple organizations. 

In academic year 2019-2020 I was/am on research sabbatical, based in Thailand (visiting scholar, Faculty of Economics, Thammasat University) for fall 2019 and Senegal (visiting academic, West Africa Research Center) for spring 2020 (foreshortened by COVID; I returned to the US in early April 2020).  My sabbatical research (and additional ongoing work in Bangladesh and the US) is focused on "mission-driven bureaucrats", exploring the frequency with which public servants are oriented towards improving citizen welfare and the relationship between motivation, management practice, and performance. I also have ongoing projects related to transparency, accountability, and performance inside foreign aid donor organizations.  

I've held a variety of positions outside of the academy. I was special assistant, then advisor, to successive Ministers of Finance (Liberia); ran a local nonprofit focused on helping post-conflict youth realize the power of their own ideas to better their lives and communities through agricultural entrepreneurship (East Timor); and have worked for a number of local and international NGOs (e.g. Ashoka in Thailand; Center for Jewish-Arab Economic Development in Israel). I continue to do some non-academic work on aid bargaining and aid coordination in fragile states. A proud Detroiter, I hold a BA from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!); I also hold a Ph.D. from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

High-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Tight controls and a focus on reaching pre-set measurable targets often prevent front-line workers from using skill, local knowledge, and creativity to solve problems in ways that maximize the impact of foreign aid. Drawing on a novel database of over 14,000 discrete development projects (downloadable below) across nine aid agencies and eight paired case studies of development projects, I conclude that aid agencies will often benefit from giving field agents the authority to use their own judgments to guide aid delivery. This “Navigation by Judgment” is particularly valuable when environments are unpredictable and when accomplishing an aid program’s goals is hard to accurately measure. Accomplishing results and accounting for results are sometimes in tension; focusing agents on meeting metrics sometimes undermines performance.

From the back cover:

"Honig's brilliant new book shows that when implementation is complex the ever greater tendency to reduce accountability to narrow accounting actually harms rather than helps aid effectiveness.  Management and staff of every development organization will benefit from his insights." --Lant Pritchett, Professor of the Practice of International Development, Harvard Kennedy School

"Dan Honig provides a novel, rigorous empirical examination of the outcomes of foreign aid efforts, opening up fresh possibilities for getting things done in unpredictable settings. In doing so, he offers an original approach to the age-old problems of delegation and control. Honig is a new voice to be reckoned with."  --Walter W. Powell, Stanford University

"In a panoramic study that establishes a new baseline for excellence in its domain, Dan Honig shows the vast costs of overzealous management, and why politicians and funders need to let foreign aid programs adapt themselves to local context." --Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government, Harvard University 

"Honig assesses the conditions under which high levels of agent discretion are likely to out-perform heavily controlled, top-down management practices when providing development assistance. He couples an impressive number of interviews with original statistical analysis to provide important and timely insights for scholars of international organizations and practitioners seeking to employ best practices in foreign aid delivery." --Sarah Bermeo, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University

"Honig has written an important book that deserves to be seriously engaged by both development practitioners and the scholarly community. Expertly mixing methods and drawing on systematic, comparative data, Honig explores the inner-workings of development agencies, demonstrating the conditions under which decentralizing authority to officials in the field generates better development outcomes. At a moment when how we deliver foreign assistance is a source of contentious political debate, Honig's contribution provides rigorous, empirical evidence to help guide policymakers as they consider organizational reform." --Jeremy M. Weinstein, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

International Development Proseminar (Gateway theory course for International Development concentrators; SAIS SA.400.821/822; Fall 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018)

Managing and Delivering Development Assistance (SAIS SA.400.776; Fall 2015, Spring 2017, 2018)

External Interventions to Reduce Poverty – Foreign Aid (Harvard Economics 970; Spring 2012, 2014)