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Dan Honig

Associate Professor, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

About Dan

Honig’s work focuses on the humans who comprise the administrative state and their relationships with citizens. Until 2028 he's the PI on Relational State Capacity, a European Research Council-awarded five year exploration of state capacity which argues we need to move beyond simply seeing state capacity as the technical ability of the state to "make" or "deliver" things. His most recent book, Mission Driven Bureaucrats (OUP 2024), explores how the humans who work for the state often are or can be driven by a desire to help deliver on the things their agency does.

In the News

Opinion: "Efficiency Isn’t Everything," Dan Honig (with Yamini Aiyar), Foreign Policy, April 7, 2025.

Publications

Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn't Work (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Argues that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Concludes that aid agencies will often benefit from giving field agents the authority to use their own judgments to guide aid delivery.