Susan Randolph

Early career

Prior to joining the University of Connecticut, Randolph worked for four years as head of the Program Development division at Türkiye Kalkınma Vakfı (Turkey Development Foundation), a grassroots development organisation that assists poor, landless households in establishing self-sustaining economic enterprises.^[3]

University of Connecticut

Randolph joined the University of Connecticut in 1984 as a member of the Department of Economics, where she also held an appointment in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.^[4] She served as a faculty affiliate of the university's Human Rights Institute, El Instituto: Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies, the India Studies Program, and the Asian and Asian American Studies Institutes. She co-chaired the Human Rights Institute's Economic and Social Rights Research Program from 2014 to 2019 and served on the Gladstein Committee.^[2] She holds the title of associate professor emerita.^[5]

Randolph has also served as a short-term consultant to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development.^[2]

SERF Index

Randolph's most significant scholarly contribution is the development of the Social and Economic Rights Fulfillment (SERF) Index, created in collaboration with Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Terra Lawson-Remer. The SERF Index provides a quantitative tool for measuring the extent to which countries fulfil their obligations to progressively realise economic, social and cultural rights - specifically the rights to food, health, education, housing, and work. The methodology employs an "Achievement Possibilities Frontier" approach, which benchmarks a country's performance against what countries at similar income levels have achieved, thereby enabling comparisons across differently situated nations.^[6]

The conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the SERF Index were first published in two articles in the Journal of Human Rights: "Measuring the Progressive Realization of Human Rights Obligations: An Index of Economic and Social Rights Fulfillment" (2009) and "Economic and Social Rights Fulfillment Index: Country Scores and Rankings" (2010).^[7] The SERF Index has since been adopted by the Human Rights Measurement Initiative as its income-adjusted measure of country economic and social rights performance and has been incorporated into the World Bank's Sovereign ESG Data Portal.^[8]

Human Rights Measurement Initiative

Randolph is a co-founder of the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), an independent global research collaboration that produces cross-nationally comparable data on the human rights performance of countries. At HRMI, she serves as the economic and social rights metrics lead.^[9] HRMI, which is hosted by Motu Economic and Public Policy Research in New Zealand, publishes data covering both economic and social rights and civil and political rights through its data visualisation platform, rightstracker.org.^[10]