Dr Charmaine Ramos is a political economist who examines how configurations of power and politics regulate institutional performance and change, and ultimately patterns of economic development and the distribution of any resultant benefits. She builds on her previous research in Colombia and the Philippines, where she studied the role that producer associations played in determining the mobilization of taxes collected from key agri-export sectors. Aside from her continuing work on the political economy of resource governance, she is undertaking new trajectories of research, including: the political uses of social policy and their developmental consequences in the context of the current wave of 'new populism'; and institutional pathways to universal healthcare in the Global South.