Researcher
Paul Beaumont
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Summary
Paul Beaumont received a Ph.D. in International Relations/International Environmental Studies and Development from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in 2020. He is a research professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), working in the Global Order and Diplomacy research group. Paul leads the ERC Starting Grant funded project “Navigating the Era of Indicators”, which explores the politics of quantification across education, climate, and health policy fields, as well as in global governance in general. More broadly, Paul's research interests include IR theory, the (dis)functioning of international institutions, global environmental politics, nuclear weapons, hierarchies in world politics, and pluralist research methods.
Paul has published two monographs: "Performing Nuclear Weapons: How Britain Made its Bomb Make Sense" (Palgrave 2021) and “The Grammar of Status Competition: International Hierarchies and Domestic Politics” (Oxford University Press, 2024). The latter won the APSA Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section book prize in 2025. His research has featured in numerous leading journals, including European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, Contemporary Security Policy, New Political Economy, Third World Quarterly and International Studies Review, among others. He has also co-edited two volumes, Governing Nature and the Making of World Order and The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development, and a special issue on "Status Symbols in World Politics".
A keen contributor to policy and public debate, Paul has published multiple op-eds in Klassekampen, Aftenposten, among other Norwegian national newspapers. Committed to fostering pluralistic, rigorous and theoretically informed research within the discipline of IR and adjacent fields, Paul is currently an editor of the Nordics’ leading IR journal Cooperation and Conflict and a co-chair of the Knowledge in IR (KnowIR) section for the European International Studies Association.
Expertise
Education
2020 Doctorate, International Relations/International Development and Environment Studies. The Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)
2014 Master of Science, International Relations. (NMBU)
2006 Bachelor, Economic History. The London School of Economics (LSE)
Work Experience
2026- Research Professor, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)
2020-2026 Senior Researcher, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)
2019 Visiting Scholar. The Department of Politics and International Studies. Cambridge University
2015-2020 PhD Candidate, The Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)
2015 Junior Research Fellow. NUPI
2013-2015 Academic Writing Advisor, NMBU
2006-2012 English Teacher - Prague, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, London, Gliwice
Aktivitet
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Svar til Forskningsrådet
In this opinion piece, Paul Beaumont responds to the Research Council of Norway about its new digital system for project applications.
Portalen til helvete
In this op-ed in Klassekampen, Paul Beaumont writes about the Research Council of Norway's new digital system for project applications.
Kan fire av ti norske gutter virkelig ikke lese?
Research Professor Paul Beaumont writes about PISA and its reliability as an indicator of the quality of the Norwegian school system in this Aftenposten op-ed.
Conclusion: Public–private relations in the wild
In this conclusion, the authors draw on their readings of all the contributions in 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development: Insights from Ethiopia' to highlight the contributors’ insights and the connections between them, as well as suggest new directions and questions that have been opened up by the volume’s collective analysis. The chapters in this volume illuminate how the PPP agenda is rendered in markedly different ways as it moves from policy to practice despite sustained efforts to refine PPP frameworks and claims about their importance for achieving the UN SDGs and reducing the international development finance gap. By tracing partnership relations over time and across borders within and beyond Ethiopia, the contributors to this volume shed light on messy constellations of actors, institutions and relations that fit – although often uneasily – under the PPP umbrella. They follow public and private configurations, from beer breweries to textile exporters to housing and hospitals, in international development cooperation and around the windowless conference rooms of the World Bank. In this conclusion, the authors suggest that the unruliness, inconsistencies and arbitrariness that emerge through these cases indicate that PPPs can be fruitfully reframed not only as wild but also as situated in the wild. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
Unravelling the Ps in public–private partnerships for development
With the launch of UN Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) became formalised as both an objective of and a means of implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. An established policy-oriented research agenda has long sought to make sense of the ‘jungle’ of PPPs by identifying critical success factors and chronic shortcomings. Yet the instrumentalist inclination to evaluate PPPs restricts this agenda’s theoretical horizons. Building on a relatively smaller but significant body of critical PPP work, Agenda 2030 calls for research that embraces the messiness of PPPs and treats the plasticity of the term as a feature to understand rather than a bug to be overcome. To wit, Agenda 2030 advances an inductive approach to exploring the PPP buzzword in its specific enactments and makes the case for problematising the Ps in PPP from the bottom up and from multiple perspectives. Ultimately, Agenda 2030 highlights the theoretical value of escaping the evaluation meta-narrative that delimits the theoretical potential of a great deal of existing research on PPPs for development and PPPs more broadly. In addition to helping inform and enhance our understanding of the contemporary PPP agenda, this approach is useful for making sense of the political and capitalist forces that are shaping not only Ethiopia but the world at large today. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
Tracing the travels of a development model
Historicising Ethiopia’s contemporary global Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) agenda, this chapter examines how its contemporary manifestation in Ethiopia bears the imprint of the PPP model’s checkered historical and political trajectory. The underlying analytical gambit is that tracing the ‘travels’ of the PPP model – via analyses of China and the UK’s PPP waves – can both help explain how Ethiopia ended up adopting the model in the first place and understand the distinct form this adoption has taken. In the process, the analysis shows how Ethiopia’s PPP policy relies upon a highly selective process of ‘lessons’ to be ‘learned’ from (un)successful projects that partially but not entirely airbrushes out experiences that would threaten the uptake of the model. These elisions are crucial for imagining that the risks of PPP can be overcome with capacity-building and more rigorous management processes. The chapter contends that this selective learning can help account for the spread of PPPs to Ethiopia and the persistence of the PPP promotion efforts by international financial institutions globally. Taken together, the chapter makes the case for treating the PPP model as an unfolding global process. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'
The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development – Insights from Ethiopia
With the launch of Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) were heralded as an important means of realising the UN Sustainable Development Goals and providing more sustainable development financing in the global south. This book explores PPPs from the bottom up, drawing on extensive empirical research in Ethiopia to illuminate the diversity of practices, arrangements and contradictions that the PPP agenda enables, generates and occludes. Despite the omnipresence of PPP talk among governments and international organisations, donor and recipient agencies, and private actors, there exists no universally agreed definition of PPPs, and in practice they encompass a remarkable diversity of activities and arrangements. This book thoroughly examines PPPs in Ethiopia, considering what actors they bring together, what power dynamics they produce, how the dynamics alter them, what PPPs and such dynamics say about changing state–society relations and how the individual Ps of PPPs get infused with context-specific meaning. By investigating how PPPs play out in practice, the book sheds new light on how this ambiguous but proliferating discourse is changing the meanings, processes and mechanisms of international development. This book illuminates the unseen consequences of translating bold sustainable development goals into practice and will be of interest to researchers and practitioners of international development.
International finance institutions and the public-private partnership dilemma
Over the last decade, leading international finance institutions (IFIs) have devoted considerable resources seeking to revive public–private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure. This renewed PPP agenda has sought to learn from the model’s checkered track record and the ‘evidence-based critique’ that emerged in its wake. Indeed, rather than dampening enthusiasm for PPPs, this critique has inspired IFIs to elaborate a growing array of best practices and institutional reforms intended to help governments avoid past mistakes and thereby undertake PPP programmes that achieve value for money at scale. Despite these efforts, the pipeline of PPPs has stagnated. Taking stock of the agenda’s results and conducting a close reading of the new PPP guidance, this article suggests that this outcome is neither surprising nor necessarily a failure. By developing rigorous mechanisms for achieving value for money and thus adding complexity and transaction costs, the new PPP agenda helps governments avoid predation but at the cost of appealing to the private sector. Rather than ushering in a new dawn of PPPs, the agenda simply moves the dial on what the article terms the PPP Dilemma: whereby governments must choose between a high-volume but low-quality PPP world and a low-volume but high-quality PPP world.
Guns, Butter and Karl Polanyi: Securing Europe in the post-neoliberal world
Trump 2.0 has contested and sought to upturn the so-called liberal international order. Within Europe this entailed leveraging geoeconomic dependence to force NATO members to publicly commit to spending 5% of GDP on defence and the EU into an asymmetrical trade deal. Europe is thus undergoing a guns versus butter debate that threatens the social contract and the solvency of Europe. Taking stock of the scramble across Europe to keep NATO keeping on - and drawing upon research that explores the transnational and economic roots of the rise of the far right - this essay argues that to effectively respond to Trump 2.0 and stem tide of anti-democratic currents will require rethinking contemporary EU economic doxa – imperfectly captured by the term neoliberalism. Such a reckoning should involve a systematic reconsideration of how far and how deep markets and market logics should be institutionalised within European societies. In short, Europe should seek to proactively shape the emerging post-neoliberal trend to seek to ensure that what comes next retains the existing order’s stated commitments to democracy, tolerance, and human dignity. Conversely, failure to rethink Europe’s commitment to neoliberalism risks strengthening those that are convinced the status quo embodies little worth salvaging.