It’s time to finish the job

Dr Danny Sriskandarajah is Chief Executive of the New Economics Foundation and author of "Power to the People: Use your voice, change the world" (Headline Press, 2024).

His previous roles include CEO of Oxfam GB, Secretary General of CIVICUS, Director of the Royal Commonwealth Society, Interim Director of the Commonwealth Foundation and various posts at the Institute for Public Policy Research. He is a Trustee of the Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation and has previously been a Trustee of the Baring Foundation, Comic Relief, Disasters Emergency Committee and Praxis Community Projects. He has been a member of two United Nations High Level Panels, on digital co-operation and humanitarian finance.

Danny holds a Masters and Doctorate from Oxford University, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Sydney.

Elisabeth Costa is the Managing Director of the Behavioural Insights Team in the UK where she leads a broad portfolio of work across all areas of domestic policy and international programmes.

Elisabeth’s particular expertise is economic policy and digital markets, regularly contributing to policy discussions and public debate in the UK and in other countries around the world on online decision-making, digital markets, financial behaviour and consumer vulnerability.

In addition to leading BIT’s work in the United Kingdom Elisabeth is currently a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, and completed her postgraduate studies at Harvard University.

Jane Suiter is Professor in Dublin City University’s (DCU) School of Communications where her research focuses on the information environment in the public sphere and in particular on scaling up deliberation and tackling disinformation. She is also Director of DCU’s Institute for Future Media, Democracy and Society.

Jane has been involved in various research and oversight capacities on the Irish Citizens’ Assemblies that began in 2012 and was a founder member of We the Citizens (2011), Ireland’s first deliberative experiment. She is a member of the OECD’s FutureDemocracy network and on the advisory board of the Federation of Innovation in Democracy Europe (FIDE) and has also advised in Scotland and elsewhere on citizens’ assemblies. Jane has testified at the OECD, the European Parliament, the UN and the UNDP as well as the Oireachtas. She was the joint winner of the Brown Democracy Medal in 2019 and the President’s Award for Research. She was awarded the prestigious title of the Irish Research Council’s Researcher of the Year in 2020.

Jane’s work has been published in over 30 journals and she is a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University and the Reuters Institute at Oxford University. She is a frequent contributor to broadcast and print media and a former journalist having worked as Economics Editor at The Irish Times and for other media such as the FT Group and AP Dow Jones.

Keisha Thompson FRSA is a Manchester-based writer, performance artist and producer. She is currently working for The Guardian as the Programme Manager for the Legacy of Enslavement Project. She is Co-Chair of the Independent Theatre Council, a trustee of Olympias Music Foundation and recipient of the DARE Art Prize 2024 from Opera North and the University of Leeds in association with National Science and Media Museum and The Tetley.

Formerly, she has been Artistic Director and CEO of Contact, Manchester, Chair of radical arts funding body, Future’s Venture Foundation and was the first recipient of The Arts Foundation Theatre Makers Award in 2021.

She studied Politics and Philosophy followed by a PGCE in Mathematics at University of Manchester before delving into the arts and education sector. She has taken up posts such as Senior Manager for Children and Young People at the Arts Council England and Senior Education Programme Manager at The World Reimagined.

In May 2022, she completed a residency with Esplanade Theatre in Singapore. Her focus was on her on-going project, DeCipher. The expansive educational project, looks at mathematical pedagogy and how it can be taught in a creative way in non-educational spaces. She is working to find out how it can be decolonised, democratised and dismantled. The goal is to create interactions that allow for agency, joy and discovery. A maths lesson that feels like a poetry workshop, a dance class or an interactive installation.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is also Vice-President of the Political Studies Association, was Chair of the Universities Policy Engagement Network from 2021-2023, and has served on the Council of the International Political Science Association since 2014.

A former ESRC board member, Matthew led the 2020 national review of research leadership – Fit for the Future – and is currently working with UKRI in relation to talent management and research culture investments. A former special advisor in both the House of Lords and House of Commons, Prof. Flinders specialises in theoretically-informed policy-relevant research and is a former ESRC National Impact Champion.

Matthew is a former winner of the Harrison Prize (2002), the Richard Rose Prize (2004), WJM Mackenzie Prize (2009) and the Sam Aaronovitch Memorial Prize (2012) and the author or editor of nineteen books and over 200 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters. He has also written and presented a number of documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and is a regular columnist for the Times Higher Education.

Nicholas Gruen is the Founder of Lateral Economics, Visiting/Adjunct Professor at King’s College London and the University of Technology Sydney. He is Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance.

Nicholas has chaired global aged care software provider Health Metrics and Kaggle which was acquired by Google in 2017.

He has advised two Cabinet Ministers, taught at the Australian National University and sat on the Productivity Commission and worked within the Business Council of Australia. He chaired The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) from 2010 to 2016, the Federal Government’s Innovation Australia in 2013-14 and in 2009 chaired the Government 2.0 Taskforce.

Nicole Curato is a Professor of Political Sociology at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. Her research demonstrates the transformative power of deliberative governance in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Recently, her research started focusing on building a “global deliberative democracy” inspired by decolonial theory and practice, critical historiography, and ambitious democratic experiments such as the Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis.

She is the founder of the Global Citizens’ Assembly Network (GloCAN), former editor of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy, founding editor of the Deliberative Democracy Digest, and founder of the Deliberative Democracy Summer School. She has published three books on deliberative democracy, numerous journal articles, public reports, and op-eds for outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, and Australian Foreign Affairs.

Suzanne is a highly skilled qualitative researcher with 20 years of public policy research experience. She led the qualitative research team at Ipsos MORI, an independent research agency, from 2013 and in that role was responsible for skills development, growing the business and embedding new and innovative approaches to solving policy problems with a focus on deliberative, participatory, ethnographic and digital methodologies.

Suzanne has worked for both national and international clients across a range of policy areas including trust in government and polarisation, the value of evidence, work and welfare, ageing and inequality.

As Director of Engagement at the Policy Institute, Suzanne is responsible for embedding qualitative and deliberative methods in the work of the Policy Institute and developing new, innovative approaches to involving citizens in policy making, ensuring the work it does continues to have impact. Suzanne also represents the Policy Institute on the Ageing Research at King’s (ARK) Committee