Domain
Global Development
SDG & nexus modeling, evaluation, and country-embedded work. My development work — program evaluation, capacity modeling, research partnerships in complex country contexts — sits at the meeting point of the other areas here: systems methods applied to reform and institution-building, done with in-country partners rather than prescribed from outside. Much of my published work here models the interactions among the Sustainable Development Goals and the water-energy-food nexus — the analytical backbone for reasoning about development trade-offs. I'm keeping this page short and honest — there is more work in this domain than I've featured here, and I'd rather point you to the real record than pad it.
Evidence
The work here
The development-facing work I can point to directly:
- Sahel reform work. A multi-year judicial-reform engagement in Burkina Faso with the United States Institute of Peace, plus a related public write-up (“A Sahel Town Builds a Way to Improve Reforms—and Foreign Aid”) — my closest public look at how foreign aid and reform programs actually take hold. Read the case: Systems thinking for Burkina Faso judicial reform.
- SDG-interaction modeling. A two-part systems approach to modeling interactions among the Sustainable Development Goals — cross-impact network analysis and system dynamics (Zelinka & Amadei, 2019).
- Water-energy-food nexus. Methods and modeling for the sustainable-development nexus as a coupled system, including an encyclopedia chapter on water-energy-food interconnections (Zelinka & Daher, 2021; Daher & Zelinka, 2021).
The full list, with co-authors and venues, is on the publications page. Adjacent questions this domain also covers — resource governance and how natural-resource wealth interacts with institutions, transboundary water, community-capacity modeling — draw on the same systems methods; I don't have standalone public case studies for them yet, so ask if one is relevant to you.
This area has more behind it than the lines above — dissertation work, conference papers, and collaborations that aren't written up as standalone case studies yet, and some of it isn't mine to publish. Rather than invent named projects, I've linked the published record. If you have a specific development question, ask — I'd rather scope it honestly than list projects I didn't lead.
Closely related areas:
Method
The method here
What this domain draws on: systems thinking and system-dynamics modeling to reason about how a development intervention moves through an institution; cross-impact and network methods to map how goals interact; participatory design with in-country partners, so the work is built with the people affected; and a habit of naming assumptions and showing uncertainty, because nexus models are only as good as the boundaries you draw around them.
Where this domain leads
If you're a foundation, institute, or development organization, the foundations lane is the direct route. Tell me the context and who your in-country partners are, and I'll be straight about whether this is a fit.