Over the years, my work has focused on understanding the nature and dynamics of social challenges – and the contexts where they take place – to inform and support efforts to address them, particularly in places where poverty and inequality are endemic and public resources are used ineffectively. Since completing my PhD in 1996, I’ve been an academic, a parliamentary researcher, a policy analyst, a civil servant, a campaigner and Executive Director of Global Integrity, a non-profit which was focused on governance and anti-corruption.
Since 2023, I’ve worked independently, exploring issues relating to public policy, corruption, systemic investing, market systems development and philanthropic funding practices. These explorations are informed by an understanding of complex social systems and the behaviours that bring them to life which centres relationships, power, incentives, learning and emergence, and prioritises the lived experience of local actors.
I’ve worked with clients including philanthropies, development agencies, non-governmental organisations, think tanks and academic colleagues, in the UK and around the world. Much of what I do is collaborative, working with colleagues and partners who bring complementary skills, perspectives and a diversity of experience. I live in Brighton, which I love, two minutes from the sea.
A gardener cannot control what grows, not even on their own balcony! What they can do is read the ground, watch the skies, till the soil, tend the plants, chat with neighbours and learn season by season. That, for me, is how we can engage in complex social systems and is how I try to live and work. See the garden page for more about the very amateur gardening I do as part of the community at Living Vital.
Find me elsewhere
- My CV (June 2026)
- Occasional email updates
- Let’s connect