The research of the Development Economics Group focuses on the nature of institutions, drivers of institutional change, and implications of institutional change for poverty alleviation and sustainable economic development. The institutional framework encompasses both formal and informal “rules of the game” and ranges from volatile governance measures to more inert cultural variables (including gender roles). This institutional focus is applied to fields such as the organisation of commodity chains, natural resource management (especially land and water management and renewable energy use by farm households), origins and consequences of violent conflicts, and arrangements as to risk sharing. In all these fields, the approach is one of developing theories and models that capture the incentives of individual agents as well as the resulting aggregate performance, and testing these models against empirical data.