Research

Please see the "Dissertation" page of this site for a summary of my dissertation.
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​Journal articles

Gus Greenstein. 2022. The Influence of Alternative Development Finance on the World Bank's Safeguards Regime. Global Environmental Politics 22(3): 171–93.
  • Abstract: What shapes social-environmental regulations in the World Bank? To date, scholars have emphasized the influence of nongovernmental organization activism, donor power, and various elements of the Bank’s internal culture and incentive system. This article documents a new and important source of influence: outside financing options for borrower countries. I demonstrate this influence through an in-depth study of the World Bank’s Safeguards Review and Update, a four-year policy-making process that concluded in 2016. As alternative sources of finance carrying less stringent safeguard requirements than those of the World Bank proliferated in years preceding the Safeguards Review, borrowers gained negotiating power over Bank policy, enabling them to successfully push for more regulatory autonomy. These findings suggest that understanding the future of social-environmental standards in development finance institutions will require greater attention to new sources of finance and the power shifts they may entail.

Under review

Gus Greenstein. 2022. How Personnel Allocation Affects Performance: Evidence from Brazil’s Federal Protected Areas Agency. (Revise and resubmit at Public Administration.) [Available on request]
  • ​Abstract: Many government agencies operate with fewer personnel than they need to perform effectively, especially in the developing world. Yet little research has explored how agencies might allocate their personnel across the territories they cover so as to maximize performance with limited numbers of staff. I address this gap through a study of Brazil's federal protected areas agency, which manages the world's third largest system of conservation areas. Based on 66 interviews and econometric analyses covering 322 administrative units over ten years, I find that three factors influence which types of agency sub-units are likely to benefit most from larger staff contingents: the strength of a sub-unit's ties with local stakeholders, the size of the jurisdiction a sub-unit covers, and a sub-unit's likelihood of near-term failure. I show that personnel re-allocation strategies informed by these factors could have over this agency's first ten years reduced deforestation by approximately 1,300 sq. km. (19 percent), or about 21 times the area of Manhattan. Through management team case studies, I illustrate mechanisms through which staff have different impacts in different types of sub-units. This study contributes a framework for analyzing the efficacy of personnel allocation strategies in government agencies, with recommendations for improving conservation of one of the world's greatest natural assets.

Working papers 

Gus Greenstein and Mirko Heinzel. 2022. Bureaucratic Politics and Aid Allocation: Evidence from USAID. [Available on request]
  • Abstract: We examine the impact of bureaucratic politics on aid allocation in the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Existing studies of aid allocation have focused on donor interests, recipient needs, and recipient merit without accounting for the bureaucratic decision-making process that helps determine these aid budgets. We theorize that larger country offices have stronger incentives and greater capacity to persuade headquarters to send them more resources. We test this theory using novel data on USAID staffing patterns between 1980 -2017 and leverage staff rotation patterns using a compound instrumental variable strategy. Our results show that staff increases in country offices lead to a substantial increase in aid allocation. Our most conservative estimation predicts that a standard deviation increase in the number of staff would, on average, increase allocated aid to a country by approximately 35 percent . We draw on complementary interview research to explore mechanisms underlying this effect. The findings have important implications for debates regarding the allocation of development assistance as well as broader discussions on bureaucratic politics in US foreign policy.


Gus Greenstein. 2022. Barriers to Effective Spatial Assignment of Bureaucrats: The Case of Protected Area Management in Brazil. [ISA Environmental Studies Section Graduate Student Paper Award, 2023] [Available on request.]
  • Abstract: Misallocation of staff across subjurisdictions can have profound negative impacts on the performance of decentralized government agencies. Despite significant literature illustrating potential drivers of staff movement within and across bureaucracies, we lack an integrated view of the range of factors that can produce personnel misallocation. I build a conceptual framework for analyzing the drivers of personnel misallocation through an historical study of personnel allocation issues in Brazil's federal protected areas agency, the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity, which prior research suggests could have prevented roughly 1,300 sq. km. deforestation over its first 10 years through more effective personnel allocation. I highlight the potential importance of a range of factors rooted in staff preferences, the geographic profile of an agency's subjurisdictions, and internal conflict over strategy. I especially emphasize initial agency design decisions and the role of legal institutions in preventing certain reforms to agency management practice. This framework can serve as a conceptual reference point for future efforts to diagnose, address, and prevent staff allocation challenges. 
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Gus Greenstein and Dan Honig. 2022. Managing Aid Personnel. Chapter in preparation for The Elgar Handbook of Aid and Development​. Eds: Raj Desai, Shanta Devarajan, and Jennifer Tobin.
  • Abstract: The actions of aid agency personnel are critical to the success of development projects, but management of these agents receives little attention in the aid and development literature. We apply ideas from public management, organizational economics, psychology, and other disciplines to the aid sector. In so doing, we provide a framework for analyzing how personnel management practices and the organizational contexts in which aid agencies operate impact the individuals on whom aid performance depends. We emphasize the contingent nature of personnel management strategy. The relative utility of specific practices depends on several factors, including the demand for adaptation in a given task and environment, the degree of need for context-specific knowledge, and the motivational makeup of personnel. We also provide evidence suggesting that the increasing instrumentalization of aid and a focus on quantifiable results in the context of a fragmenting development landscape may be influencing personnel management in ways that are shrinking the talent pool from which these agencies can draw. This chapter constitutes a resource for agency managers and a set of hypotheses ripe for further empirical exploration.​
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Projects in prgress

Policy Durability in the Forestry Sector: A Global Comparison. (With Ben Cashore)

Bureaucratic Structure and Climate Flows in the World Bank. (With Ricky Clark and Noah Zucker) 

Foundations of Institutional Resilience: Brazil's Protected Areas Agency Under Jair Bolsonaro


Policy reports

​World Bank (2022). Enhancing the Effectiveness of the World Bank’s Global Footprint. Independent Evaluation Group. Washington, DC: World Bank.
  • Abstract: The World Bank aims to further expand and adjust its global footprint by the mid-2020s, especially in lower-income countries and those affected by fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV). This first-of-its-kind evaluation assesses the effectiveness of the World Bank’s past decentralization efforts in a systematic way to inform the new expansion of the World Bank’s global footprint. Decentralization refers to the World Bank’s efforts to expand its global footprint by moving more staff, especially staff with operational and decision-making duties, to the field. The report examines the benefits and challenges of staff decentralization and makes recommendations to improve its process and outcomes, while also preserving the Bank’s global nature, which is one of its comparative strengths.

Journal articles unrelated to current research agenda

Ryan Hledik and Gus Greenstein (2016). “The Distributional Impacts of Residential Demand Charges.” The Electricity Journal 29(6): 33–41.