About the Institute of Global Affairs

Rethinking the world - together

The IGA aims to build a vibrant intellectual environment for original, rigorous and significant thinking and broader impact in London, but also to form an alliance of centres of excellence in research and policy thinking in emerging economies. By employing multidisciplinary approaches and encouraging evidence-based policy making, it also aspires to promote deeper understanding and peer-to-peer transfer of knowledge across emerging and developing economies. The IGA wants to offer a 'safe space' that is open, fair and transparent and where students, government, private sector and civil society from all around the world can meet to address the challenges of the 21st century.

IGA engages ten LSE departments and currently has eight constituent centres which includes six regional centres at different stages of development, LSE IDEAS, the second-ranked university-based think tank in the world, and the Centre for Women, Peace and Security recently established through a grant from the UK government.

In addition, a research-based 'do tank' focusing on connecting research and policy action and specifically research on implementation is being developed in collaboration with the Institute for New Economic Thinking head-quartered in New York.

Unlike some of its leading competitors the IGA is keen not to build up a faculty separate from that of the participating departments. Rather, the IGA wants to use the strength of LSE’s departments to guarantee quality and attract first-rate faculty. 

The regional centres are platforms through which LSE can mobilize its expertise across disciplines in certain geographic areas. While the individual centres must have their own agendas and priorities depending on the challenges in the individual regions, the IGA facilitates and encourages them, as well as the wider LSE community of faculty and students, to engage on common research themes and in a number of research-based policy initiatives, including Global Climate, Global Finance, Global Health, and Global Migration. Centres are cultivating existing, and developing new, links to local research and policy institutions thus enhancing the understanding of the local and regional contexts to the global challenges. 

The inaugural Director of the IGA is Professor Erik Berglof. 

 

• We aspire to become Europe’s leading school of global public policy, unparalleled in our academic excellence, strong engagement on global policy challenges and connection to local contexts, with an established and well-recognised set of multidisciplinary research programmes that have broad external impact.
• We aim to have regional centres covering all major geographies which will build the local networks and partnerships enabling us to link up to global research and knowledge in a peer-to-peer fashion. In addition, we will establish a global policy lab that will enable us to carry out experiments to link research with policy interventions.
• We are establishing five global initiatives on migration, global financial architecture, health and urbanisation, climate finance and governance that involve world-class researchers and exceptional students from across LSE as well as external partners from academia, policy environments and the private sector. Through each initiative, we aim to generate a set of research projects, and will, in each case, collect data and other evidence that measures and substantiates impact on real-world policy decisions or the thinking of important stakeholders. We will pursue innovative solutions to hard global and local challenges.
• We aim to serve as a transparent, honest and fair space for researchers, policy makers and other stakeholders from government, the private sector and civil society to discuss challenging issues in a non-partisan environment.
• We will make a major contribution to LSE’s overall knowledge exchange through public and bespoke events as well as traditional and social media working with our local academic and policy partners.