Natalie Playford

Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science
University of Toronto

Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto specializing in International Relations and Development Studies. My dissertation, Between Commitments and Compliance: The Adoption and Implementation of Gender Clauses in Multilateral Development Bank Lending, investigates when gender commitments become incorporated into loan agreements and subsequently implemented in development projects. This research draws on an original dataset of approximately 4,900 World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank loan agreements and 1,793 World Bank and Asian Development Bank project completion reports matched to their corresponding loan agreements. The broader dissertation combines statistical analysis, supervised machine learning, and manual text analysis to examine both the adoption and implementation of gender provisions across multilateral development banks.

Beyond my dissertation, my current projects examine whether governments strategically time gender reforms around CEDAW reporting cycles, how financial crises affect the selection of women as national political executives, and why the WTO’s procedural efforts to coordinate trade governance with other issue areas have not generated substantive policy coherence. I have also contributed to past and ongoing collaborative research projects involving the expansion of the African Debt Database through web scraping, API integration, and automated analysis of sovereign debt documents; the gendered norms and psychological biases that restrict women’s participation in national security spaces; and the transmission of gender-related political economy ideas across the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the International Trade Centre, the World Trade Organization, the South Centre, and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development.

I have more than six years of academic research experience and more than four years of university-level teaching experience. I have taught comparative development and supported courses in international relations, research methods, data analysis, gender and public policy, international law, and global governance. My methodological training includes R, Python, computational text analysis, and LaTeX, supplemented by advanced quantitative training through the ICPSR Summer Program at the University of Michigan and certification in Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models.

I hold an Honors B.A. in Political Science from King’s University College at Western University and an M.A. in Global Governance from the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo.

Research Interests

International Political Economy · International Organizations · Development Finance · Gender and Development · Global Governance