In the 1960s he was deputy director general of the Economic Planning Staff of the Ministry of Overseas Development and acting director of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex before becoming Warden of Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford.
Pattnaik has described Orissa as a "DFID colony", referring to the British Department for International Development (DFID).
ATP International Series | United States Department of Defense | International Monetary Fund | United States Department of State | United States Department of Justice | United States Department of Agriculture | International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement | ATP International Series Gold | International Space Station | Amnesty International | International Olympic Committee | BirdLife International | United States Department of Energy | International Finance Corporation | International Organization for Standardization | United States Department of War | International Telecommunication Union | International Criminal Court | One Day International | International Nonproprietary Name | International Labour Organization | International Civil Aviation Organization | International Boxing Federation | Toronto International Film Festival | International Atomic Energy Agency | United Nations Industrial Development Organization | United States Department of Veterans Affairs | International Maritime Organization | International Development Association | United Nations Conference on Trade and Development |
In 2002, Researchers at Gamos and the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, funded by Department for International Development UK, documented that in Uganda, Botswana and Ghana, people were spontaneously using airtime as a proxy for money transfer.
It has active working relationships with NGO's like the UN, the EU, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and government bodies including the United States Agency for International Development, Canadian International Development Agency, the United Kingdom's Department for International Development, and Germany's Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (Germany).
He toured an exhibition of photographs taken in Semipalatinsk by his friend the actress and photographer Kimberley Joseph from the Scottish Parliament, to the European Parliament, the UK Department for International Development, the United Nations headquarters in New York and finally, to Almaty, Astana and Semipalatinsk itself in Kazakhstan.
In August 2003, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) joined together in a collaborative research project to look at bringing together livelihoods thinking with concepts from information and communication for development, in order to improve understanding of the role and importance of information and communication in support of rural livelihoods.