David Lewis (born February 6, 1960 in Totnes, Devon) is a British scholar who is Professor of Anthropology and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Background
David Lewis grew up in Bearsden, near Glasgow, Scotland, and in the city of Bath in the west of England. He read Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (1982). He has a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Bath (1989).
Before becoming a lecturer at the London School of Economics & Political Science in 1995, he was briefly a freelance development researcher and consultant. At LSE he worked at the Centre for Voluntary Organisation (CVO, later Centre for Civil Society) until 2006 when he moved into the Department of Social Policy. In 2021 he joined the LSE’s Department of International Development, where he co-directs the MSc Development Studies programme.
He has authored several books and academic articles and has presented his work at many universities around the world including Harvard, Yale, Oxford and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
His field work has been primarily in South and South East Asia, mainly Bangladesh but also including India, Nepal. Sri Lanka and Philippines. However, he has also done work in Russia, Albania, Nigeria, Uganda, Palestine and the UK.
He has another small-scale career as a singer songwriter and folk/rock musician, recording extensively with college friend John Wesley Harding, touring in Europe and the USA, and releasing five albums of original songs. In July 2020 he released a new album, Among Friends.
Academic contributions
David Lewis's main research focus is on the analysis of international development policy and the work of development organizations, and on South Asia. He has a particular interest in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society. He has also carried out research and written on agrarian change, development management, and the relationship between anthropology and development.
The main field location for his research has been Bangladesh. He first went to the country to undertake a fifteen-month period of village level fieldwork for a PhD on agricultural technology and agrarian change. This was later published in book form as Technologies and Transactions, by Dhaka University in 1991. In the early 1990s, he also worked on aquaculture and livelihoods in Bangladesh, and published Trading the Silver Seed (UPL, 1996), co-authored with Geof Wood and Rick Gregory. In 2011 he published Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society (Cambridge University Press).
David Lewis’ other books have included Anthropology, Development and the Postmodern Challenge (Pluto, 1996, with K. Gardner), The Management of Non-Governmental Organizations (Routledge, 2001), Development Brokers and Translators (Kumarian 2006, edited with David Mosse), and Non-Governmental Organizations and Development (Routledge 2009, with Nazneen Kanji).
Understanding non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
Based on his teaching at LSE, where he established one of the world's first postgraduate programmes on NGOs, Lewis has written extensively on NGOs and international development. With Nazneen Kanji he wrote Non-Governmental Organisations and Development, a critical overview text that drew together the emerging academic literature on NGOs, tracing the increasing importance of NGOs as development actors and showing how they have influenced both development theory and practice since the 1980s (2009, second edition 2021).
In 2014 he published 'NGOs, Management and Development' (Routledge 2014). This book comprehensively updated earlier editions from 2001 and 2007 to critically explore the changing field of NGOs and development, uncovering historical perspectives and analyzing contemporary settings and issues. Taking an anthropological approach to the study of organization, Lewis argues that NGO management is a highly complex field, with organizations increasingly depending on improvisation, synthesis and hybrid approaches in difficult organizational environments. Drawing upon current research across fields such as non-profit studies, development management and organization and management theory, he analyses the important new field of NGO management. By giving equal attention to the activities, relationships and internal structure of the NGO, the author develops a composite model of NGO management that sets out the distinctive challenges faced.