Ilcheong YI is Senior Research Coordinator of the Alternative Economies for Transformation Program / Transformative Social Policy and Development Program at UNRISD. He joined UNRISD in October 2008 after several years of teaching at various universities in different countries. Born in the Republic of Korea, he trained as a political scientist (BA and MA from the Department of Political Science, Seoul National University, Korea) and as a social policy analyst (D. Phil from Oxford University, UK). His research addresses a wide range of issues associated with economic, social, environmental and peace problems, and approaches, policies and institutions to address problems such as the social and solidarity economy, social policy, labor policy and the democratic state of development. He currently leads several research projects on SSE as Promotion of SSE through Public Policies: Guidelines for Local Governments and sustainable development performance indicators. In addition to his role as Senior Research Coordinator at UNRISD, he is also in charge of the Knowledge Center of the United Nations Interagency Working Group on Social and Solidarity Economy, managing two research projects: Opportunities and challenges of statistics on SSE and Encyclopedia by ESS.
Prior to joining UNRISD, Ilcheong was Associate Professor at Kyushu University, Japan (2004-2008), Visiting Professor at the Korea Foundation in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Malaya, Malaysia (2003-2004) and Visiting researcher at the Stein Rokkan Center, University of Bergen, Norway (2002-2003). He has published books, book chapters, and magazine articles, and two recent book chapters on the social and solidarity economy have been published by Social Economy in Asia (Euiyoung Kim and Hiroki Miura (eds.) 2021, Rowman and Littlefield).