Professor Gearoid Millar’s work focuses on understanding how policies and programmes are experienced by the communities in which they are applied. Much of his past work focused on understanding the local experiences of peace initiatives in post-conflict settings in West Africa. In these projects, he developed and applied an ethnographic approach to evaluation that relies on long-term fieldwork, participatory observation, and interviews to examine the impacts of widely applied peacebuilding programmes. The same methods of evaluation, however, are applicable to any policies and programmes implemented in diverse communities (whether domestic or international). As a result, over the past 5 years, Gearoid has developed a number of radically inter-disciplinary research projects seeking to apply similar methods of policy and programme evaluation to other fields of intervention. These include research with biologists examining the uptake of new farming techniques, with engineers developing new robotics technologies, and with economists and geographers studying just transitions.
Gearoid Millar
