In Memoriam - Jos Mooij, Associate Professor and Deputy Rector for Educational Affairs

With great sadness we share the news that on 28 February 2013, Dr Jos Mooij passed away. She had been ill for some time. Jos did an MSc from Wageningen Agricultural University specializing in Human Nutrition. After one and a half year of further training in the UK at the Development Policy and Practice Research Group at the Open University, she registered in 1990 for a PhD with the Centre for Asian Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Her doctoral studies (with almost two years of field work in South India) focused on the day to day implementation of processes of food policy. The study was supervised by Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Barbara Harris and Jan Breman.

Jos joined the ISS in March 1996 as an Associate Lecturer in Rural Development with the Agricultural and Rural Development (ARD) Specialisation in Staff Group IV. After the successful defense of her PhD thesis (later published by Oxford University Press as Food Policy and the Indian State) in November that year she was promoted to Lecturer, and in April 2000 to Senior Lecturer in Agricultural and Rural Development. In December 2000 she moved with her family to India to take up a position as visiting scholar at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies in Hyderabad. Here she coordinated a project on Comparative Studies of Public Policy which aimed at stimulating the interest within India of the study of public policy processes. Jos herself explained that she went to India to “be in more direct touch with the practice of development” and during this period she also undertook several research assignments all of which involved the analysis of the policy processes in one way or the other (for instance focusing on the process of budget making and decentralization of the health sector).

She rejoined the ISS in February 2004, this time as Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Development Management for the Public Policy and Management (PPM) Specialisation in the State, Society and World Development Group (Staff Group II). She herself summarized her research interest at the time under the heading “Governance, State Formation and Social Development”. She was promoted to Associate Professor in June 2007. During this period she was involved in a research programme (funded by the Ford Foundation) on governance and policy processes, in particular on the opportunities for influencing policy processes especially by marginalized groups focusing in particular on health policy; the GAPS – Governance and Policy Spaces Programme.  She collaborated in a project with a group of French and Indian Social scientist on Actors, Policies and Urban Governance which resulted in a book which she edited The Politics of Economic Reform in India (Sage 2005).  She was also involved in an IDPAD programme, Palanquin Bearers, which addressed the reproduction of social inequality in primary education in India. This led to monograph published by Routledge, Education and Inequality in India: A Classroom View (2011), which she wrote together with Manabi Majumbar. Her research output gave her a research intensive profile even when she was Deputy Rector for Educational Affairs.

Her passion for education was not confined to the study of it. Jos was a passionate teacher as well, with responsibilities in PPM and for methods courses (qualitative interview). She chaired the first  Teaching and Learning Commiteee at the ISS (2007-2011) and was a member of the Board of Examiners. She became convenor of the MPA (in Governance) Programme which the ISS runs with its partner institute in Suriname, the FHR Lim A Po Institute for Social Studies. For this programme she successfully led the accreditation process with the European Association of Public Administration Accreditation (EAPAA). Late in 2009 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she underwent treatment in the first six month of 2010. On the 1^st of July she returned to a full job at ISS. In March 2011 she was appointed Deputy Rector for Educational Affairs and immediately was in charge of two major accreditation trajectories: the re-accreditation of the ISS MA programme (for which she skillfully reformulated the complete set of learning outcomes), as well as the complicated accreditation for the Erasmus Mundus joint degree in Public Policy involving three other European academic institutes. Both these routes were successfully completed: the MA programme at the ISS and the Mundus MAPP both received their official accreditation.    

Only a few months in her Deputy Rectorship the cancer returned and she underwent chemotherapy from mid-2011 onwards. Relentlessly, however, she continued her work and she could proudly open the academic year 2012/2013 at the ISS announcing five new Majors— the result of a restructuring process which she in a very careful manner had brought to a good end, or, as described by a colleague last week as ''the best MA programme we have ever had at ISS''. Sadly, she did not live to see the first graduation of the programme and thus harvest the fruits of what she had started.  

Colourful, kind and competent, an expert in her field, Jos was a colleague who found joy in her work, who was a passionate educationalist with a great belief in the important role education can play in international development and, above all, was a warm and lovely person on whom you could build.