Lisa Denney is a Principal Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for Human Security and Social Change at La Trobe University. She has twenty years of experience working in Australia, the United Kingdom, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific leading and participating in research teams and providing technical support to development programs, governments and civil society, designing and delivering training and conducting program design and evaluation. Her interests focus on the politics of development, relationships between security and development, access to justice, governance, gender and - across all of these - the need to better account for local practice and realities. Lisa has a strong background in political economy analysis and adaptive programming approaches, regularly working with policymakers and practitioners to embed these in practice.

Lisa was formerly a Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute in London, where she remains a Research Associate. Lisa has also worked with the Secretariat of the g7+ Group of Fragile States, managed the Sierra Leone country program for the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium and led research streams on community policing, legal pluralism and the politics of security and justice programming. She is actively involved in the Working Group for Customary and Informal Justice and is a member of the Research for Development Impact Committee.

Lisa completed her PhD in International Politics at Aberystwyth University in 2010, with a thesis focusing on the political and bureaucratic challenges of engaging informal security and justice actors in DFID’s policing and justice reform programs in Sierra Leone. She has undertaken research in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Laos, Malawi, Myanmar, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste and is the author of Justice and Security Reform: Development Agencies and Informal Institutions in Sierra Leone, published with Routledge in 2014, as well as numerous academic and policy papers.