Bringing You Back Home: Sutton MacQueen (MGP ‘19) Talks About Pardee Days and Global Development
Written by Charlotte Cheung (BA in International Relations and Economics, ‘27)
In the series Bringing You Back Home, we talk about how Pardee has shaped our alumni’s paths in significant ways that would not have been possible without their time here. Sutton MacQueen (MGP ‘19) shares her thoughts on the defining challenge in her field, her favorite Pardee courses, what a successful career in global development entails, and her favorite moment in Pardee. Sutton is an Institutional Advancement Officer at the Center of Global Development.
What was your favorite moment at Pardee?
When I took Introduction to Microeconomics, and I remember very specifically that our professor and a friend in our cohort shared the same birthday, and we were all in a study session with an exam at 8pm in the night, so I have a very hilarious memory of singing “happy birthday” in the middle of exam stress when you don’t feel like a real person.
How has your Pardee education prepared you for your current role in fundraising for development financing?
My goal is to ensure that we’re able to convey pertinent topics to donors accurately. In my role, I combine a lot of what I learned at BU Pardee on global situations and how they affect development, as that’s essentially what my organization researches across different topics – so we have different focus areas like health, migration, education. I oversee a lot of the grant management process, so communication outreach to donors proactively, and throughout that process making sure that everybody’s excited about the work we’re doing, understands what we’re doing, and that we’re being good stewards of the money we’re entrusted with. My job is to be able to understand the nuances and specifics of that work, and translate the work our fellows are doing to a broader audience. So not exactly a subject matter expert, but fluent enough in those topics to be able to translate those things to donors: this is why this is important; this is why you should fund this work; this is how funding could accelerate impact.
All boils down to a question on “relative to what?” – something Professor Gallagher said in one of my first classes with him-: Here are the things I know how to do, but how does it shape the larger environment that I’m trying to place myself in? I think that’s the hardest thing about working in global development: it’s a giant landscape. You have people who drill down into issues because you need to do that, because we want the best possible understanding that we can have. But you also need to be able to connect it to the systems and the broader global governance ecosystem.
What Pardee courses helped you understand the language of the field, and which professors stand out to you?
In Professor Kevin Gallagher’s class on global governance, we examined how major global institutions – the World Bank, the IMF, the UN – operate on a global scale. I remember early on, he mentioned: “Data is great. We want to make evidence-informed decisions, we want evidence backing the calls that these people are making that are impacting thousands of lives and livelihoods. But you always have to look at data with this question: relative to what?” That stuck in the back of my head so aggressively, and it’s still something I think all of the time. Even now, while I don’t work directly with the data, as I’m reading what our fellows are producing, it’s always in the background of my mind: what this is relevant to, what is the benchmark for where this improvement or decline began, how has a certain intervention affected this field.
People and Power with Professor Jeremy Menchik was an interesting pairing with the more technical discussions I was having on global governance institutions and economics. The class was on movements, and how people argue for movements, what makes movements stronger, and how people get them to permeate different corners of society. I remember asking questions such as: Why should people care about a movement or topic? What does it mean to make somebody care about something, or to engender their care on some issue? Who shapes the norms, and how do they shift, and why do they shift, and what does this mean for institutions and people of power? Thinking about why people care about certain things and oppose things allowed me to pair that with what I was learning about multilateral cooperation to gain a fuller understanding of some of the issues I was looking at and how we go about moving the needle on these things.
What do you think is the single biggest challenge facing global development financing in the next ten years?
A lot of people were already thinking about what the most effective aid flows and the best value-for-money are. But as institutions working towards global development experience an unprecedented constraint in resources, the defining challenge – how to allocate scarce resources – rose in scales of magnitude.
So it highlights even more sharply questions like: What does it mean to be effective and do you need to totally prioritize or deprioritize something? There’s probably an answer in the middle, but recent aid cuts have made it so much of a pressing question. In my role working in fundraising, resources are being constrained at a rate ten times more. Funding from the biggest organizations in the world, such as the Gates Foundation – which makes up a big portion of global philanthropy – is but a tiny fraction of the official development assistance from, previously, USAID and other governments. There are just so many more holes to be filled now with the abrupt ending of governmental aid and determining the best value-for-money becomes a much harder question, with much more urgency to it.
So these decisions have to be made and priorities have to be set around what deserves more money. If the baseline question is “how are we effectively allocating resources,” do you then decide to cut out certain aspects or cut all but at a lesser level to cater to a larger set of issues?
Say, climate, health, and education are your top three agendas. Are you cutting out climate because you decided health and education are more important, or are you going to fund all of these at 40% instead of the 70% that I was going to fund health and education if I cut out climate? It brings out an important struggle: As much as people have tried, we don’t know everything we can about the effects of cutting out those interconnections. Yes, we could deprioritize climate funding. But if we’re doing that and then having outsized climate effects in countries where people are also struggling for health and education, that’s going to increase the need there. This is hardly a new question for the development community, but it’s certainly been thrown into sharper relief in the past year.