Globalisation has made a major impact on world poverty, especially in India and China, according to World Bank and Harvard University expert Dr Michael Woolcock, who delivered a guest lecture at the University’s Coleraine campus this week.

Dr Woolcock’s lecture - ‘Globalisation and Equitable Development: Bringing Social Institutions Back In’ - was hosted by the University’s UNESCO centre, and coincided with the launch of the centre’s Annual Report for the period 2003/04.

In a wide ranging ‘tour d’horizon’ of current issues in international development, Dr Woolcock suggested that problems of governance and the need to find ways of expressing and overcoming the social tensions generated by the processes of globalisation is of primary importance for the international community.

“The overriding challenge for policymakers is not merely to ‘manage’ globalisation in a technocratic sense, but to recognise that key aspects of the very solutions they seek are often not knowable ex ante, but instead require inclusive, legitimate, and accountable spaces for negotiation between groups, who often have very different sources and levels of power,” Dr Woolcock said.

Dr Woolcock was welcomed to the University by Professor Alan Smith of the UNESCO Centre and Professor Anne Moran, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences.

(MB)