Originally from Mexico, Alina is a Principal Research Fellow in the Politics and Governance Programme at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), as well as a Senior Democracy Fellow on Applied Political Economy at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Alina completed a two-year secondment at the Developmental Leadership Program (DLP) at the University of Birmingham in October 2016, where she led a stream of work on Political Settlements and the Politics of Inclusion.
Alina’s areas of expertise include democratisation, linkages between state and society, and peace-and-state building processes in comparative perspective. Over the past ten years, she has been involved in a series of projects and assignments that seek to bridge the gap between research and policy in thinking about governance, as well as to inform more effective engagement and ways of working among international development actors in developing country settings. Most recently, Alina led an innovative action research project for the Department for International Development (DFID) testing the linkages between service delivery, social cohesion and state legitimacy in Lebanon and Jordan in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. At ODI, she has led a variety of projects on emerging democracies and the politics of institutional transformation. She has also done extensive work on political economy, and has been a pioneer on how donors can think and work in more politically aware ways, through both the Thinking and Working Community of Practice and other fora.
Alina writes frequently on these different themes, and she has authored or co-authored numerous reports for donors on many of these issues. She holds a BA from Yale University and an MPhil from Columbia University, both in political science.