Political Science

Paul Clements

Director of the MIDA Program, Professor

3354 Friedmann Hall
(269) 387-5699

Paul Clements received his PhD in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1996. His dissertation was entitled Development as if Impact Mattered: A Comparative Organizational Analysis of USAID, the World Bank and CARE based on case studies of projects in Africa. He has three articles in World Development on the organization of foreign aid, most recently “Informational Standards in Development Agency Management.” His article on “Reducing World Poverty by Improving Evaluation of Development Aid” appeared in the American Journal of Evaluation in 2008. He consults regularly for domestic and international organizations on the design of monitoring and evaluation systems. Recently he designed an evaluation quality assurance system for the United Nations Development Programme, evaluated Heifer International’s Ghana and Tanzania programs, and developed a monitoring and evaluation system for a project to bring water and sewage services to a million people in the northeast part of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. From 2000 to 2002 he carried out the annual reviews of evaluations for the United Nations Capital Development Fund. He developed the methodology for the Success Measures Project, a three-year effort by U.S. community development professionals to design standards and indicators for their field, and he authored the Success Measures Guide Book that this project produced. NeighborWorks, a national, federally funded agency, has adopted an online implementation of these indicators. He is working on Rawlsian or Kantian microfoundations for political analysis as an alternative to rational choice theory. An article co-authored by Dr. Emily Hauptmann (also in this department) entitled “The Reasonable and the Rational Capacities in Political Analysis” appeared in Politics & Society in 2002, and Dr. Clements’ paper, “A Rawlsian Analysis of the Plight of Bihar,” appeared in Studies in Comparative International Development in 2005. Dr. Clements teaches on political development and development administration and he is on the faculty of Western Michigan University’s doctoral program in evaluation. His research interests include development administration, the evaluation of foreign aid, social science methodology, and African politics.

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