Experts

Diana has been Managing Director of Bristol Pound CIC since 2018, transitioning the organisation from being the UK’s largest local currency to becoming the first local payment platform to carry tokens to incentivise and measure progress towards the city’s social and environmental targets. For the last 20 years, she has held a variety of senior management and leadership roles in the non-profit sector. Her early career was in accounts management and accounting system design and implementation.

Patricia Findlay is Distinguished Professor of Work and Employment Relations and Director of the Scottish Centre for Employment Research at the University of Strathclyde Business School. Her research, publications and grants span job quality, innovation and workplace governance, and their links to societal challenges such as addressing sustainable productivity, wellbeing and inequality. She builds research impact through senior policy advisory roles and developing future researcher capacity.

Ben Fine is Emeritus Professor of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He chairs the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (iippe.org). He has published many articles, and two books scathingly criticizing the use of social capital: ‘Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at the Turn of the Millennium’, London: Routledge, 2001; and ‘Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly’,

Alan Finlayson is Professor of Political & Social Theory at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He specialises in the study of political ideas and the political rhetorics through which they are communicated. In the last decade he has particularly focused on how social media platforms have changed political rhetoric and, thus, the ideas which dominate our politics.

John FitzGerald is an honorary fellow and adjunct professor of economics at Trinity College Dublin, a Research Affiliate at the Economic and Social Research Institute, and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He was Chairman of the Irish government’s Climate Change Advisory Council until January 2021 and he remains a member today. He is a former member of the Commission of the Central Bank of Ireland and of the Northern Ireland Authority for Energy Regulation. His areas of expertise cover the

Alongside her academic role, Amelia Fletcher is a Non-Executive Director of the Competition and Markets Authority and a member of Ofgem’s Enforcement Decision Panel. She has been on the Boards of the FCA and PSR and was Chief Economist at the OFT. In 2019, she was a member of the HM Treasury-commissioned Digital Competition Expert Panel. Her academic work focuses on competition policy, consumer policy and sector regulation, with a particular focus on behavioural economics and digital markets.