Dirk-Jan Koch is combining a career as a development practitioner and an academic. He is a policy advisor at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is studying for a PhD in social sciences at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Before joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs he was active for the European Commission in Nigeria (2003) and Plan Nederland in Cameroon (2001). He started his academic career as a statistical programmer at the London School of Economics (2002) and as a researcher at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (2004). He was a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund in 2007. He has published articles in the European Journal of Development Research and the Internationale Spectator, and has presented papers at WIDER’s annual development economics conference (2006) and the AEGIS European Conference on African Studies (2007).
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has seconded Dirk-Jan Koch to the Radboud University Nijmegen to conduct this PhD research. The author is solely responsible for the views expressed in this article.