Glynn Cochrane

AFFILIATED EXPERT

After an undergraduate degree in political economy, Glynn Cochrane studied public finance with Ursula Hicks at Oxford and completed a doctorate in social anthropology under E.E. Evans-Pritchard. He then became a tenured full professor of anthropology and public administration and Department Chairman at the Maxwell Graduate School at Syracuse University. Cochrane has served as External Examiner to the University of Dar-es-Salaam and the University of the West Indies. He is now adjunct professor at the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining, and the Department of Anthropology, at Queensland University.

Cochrane is a former World Bank staff member, Advisor to the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, and Chief Technical Advisor for Civil Service Reform in Tanzania. In 1995, he become Rio Tinto’s Group Advisor responsible for the development of a systematic response to social issues, and he worked with Rio Tinto till 2015. 

Cochrane has published extensively, including numerous books: Big Men and Cargo Cults (Oxford University Press); Development Anthropology (Oxford University Press); The Cultural Appraisal of Development Projects (Praeger Special Studies); Festival Elephants and the Myth of Global Poverty (Pearson); Anthropology in the Mining Industry (Palgrace); Max Weber’s vision for Bureaucracy : A Victim of World War I (Palgrave), and Management by Seclusion: A critique of the World Bank Approach to Poverty Alleviation (Berghahn).

For the World Bank, Cochrane wrote Reforming National Institutions for Economic Development; Policies for Strengthening Third World Local Governmentand co-authoredThe Organisation and Management of Tropical Diseases.He has also published numerous articles and papers in peer-reviewed journals and wrote Social Soundness Analysis for USAID which the agency has used in projects work for over 40 years.