About Us - PEP - Promoting Economic Pluralism

About PEP

We are seeking to create and support spaces for diverse voices, perspectives and approaches to understanding and organising our economies to help co-create truly sustainable, resilient and inclusive ones.

We work with other organisations, activists and thinkers in the new economics movement. We look to develop projects to support this movement for reform.

We are a registered charity - number 1178596.

Our approach to change

We seek to develop strategic activities and projects that influence economic analysis, teaching and thinking. We look for activities the bring diverse people together and build a stronger new economics movement.

Currently our main activities are:

  • Promoting university education that take a pluralist approach to economic teaching. This is aimed at building the profile of innovative teaching to influence economic teaching more broadly;
  • Publishing The Mint Magazine aimed at a non-academic audience which features leading new economic thinkers and provides a range of perspectives and approaches to understand our economies; and
  • Demonstrating new economic thinking in practice through our subsidiary New Economic Knowledge Services.

We collaborate with the wider new economics movement including Rethinking Economics and Exploring Economics as well as academics around the world.

Where our funding comes from

We do not receive funding from Governments. We rely on our members and sponsors, and charging for subscriptions and events to provide our core funding.

We have recieved funding from grant giving organisations. Partners for a New Economy funded our project to develop an accreditation scheme for masters courses that take a pluralist approach to economics and our Festival for Change in 2020. Polden Puckham has provided core funding.

Meet Our Trustees

Jonathan Michie

Economics Professor, Oxford University

Jonathan is Oxford’s Professor of Innovation & Knowledge Exchange, and President of Kellogg College. Jonathan is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Chair of the Universities Association for Lifelong Learning, and Managing Editor of the International Review of Applied Economics. He published ‘An Advanced Introduction to Globalisation’ (Edward Elgar 2017).

Magdalena Polan

Senior Economist

Magda is a Global Emerging Market Economist at Legal & General Investment Management in London, responsible primarily for macroeconomic analysis and investment strategy across global emerging markets. Before that, she was a senior economist at Goldman Sachs, where she led research coverage of central eastern european economies. Prior to that, she spent six years at the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, where she worked on crisis prevention and resolution, sovereign debt restructurings, development of capital markets, and issues related to monetary policy and sovereign asset and liability management.

Oliver Bettis

Senior Pricing Actuary

Oliver is a Fellow of the Institute & Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and the Chartered Insurance Institute. He has worked for over 25 years in the London insurance market and is the Senior Pricing Actuary for a division of a global reinsurance company. For over a decade he has had a strong interest in climate change, economics and the limits to growth and has spoken at numerous venues on these subjects. From 2013 to 2015 he was the inaugural chair of the IFoA’s Resource and Environment Board, one of the IFoA’s seven practice area boards. He currently serves on the IFoA’s Research and Thought Leadership Board which oversees their research programme. He is also a member of the Advisory Committee for the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP).

Nicolette Boater

Independent adviser to governmental, private-sector and community organisations

"The complexity, unpredictability and global connectedness of 21st century social, environmental and economic challenges, demands a much deeper contextual awareness, a stronger problem-solving orientation, and a more varied analytical toolbox than my neoclassical dominated economics training provided. To catalyse this, a more pluralist approach to the teaching of economics is greatly needed and long overdue."

Nicolette is a policy, business strategy and sustainable development professional delivering lasting stakeholder value in diverse governmental, business, financial services and not-for-profit environments. Her achievements range from catalysing the declaration and delivery of a local authority’s climate emergency pledge to leading an influential study of the potential for a European currency. Having spent the first part of her 25 year career discovering the inadequacy of her neoclassical dominated economics education, and the middle part searching for better ways of addressing the complexity, unpredictability and connectedness of 21st century social, environmental and economic challenges, Nicolette has enthused and supported Promoting Economic Pluralism from its inception.

...and our team

Henry Leveson-Gower

Founder and CEO

Henry is an ecological economist and policy analyst with 30 years experience. He has particular expertise in agricultural and environmental policy and regulation as well as green finance, local currencies and environmental markets. He is a director of NEKS, the founder & CEO of PEP, editor of The Mint.

He has also been a Research Fellow at the Centre for Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus, is a Fellow of the RSA and a qualified chartered accountant.

Steve Maggs

Web designer and developer

Starting at local newspaper in print design (also completing the NCTJ journalism course) Steve is a freelance web designer and developer with ten years experience both in-house and agency side. Steve has designed and built web and digital projects for clients ranging from start-ups to internationally known brands like Dell, Regus and Pandora.

Steve has built everything from simple blogs to large ecommerce sites and specialises in interactive content and web apps.

Outside of work Steve designs and sells t-shirts, reads anything connected with politics and economics and avoids driving whenever possible.

Trevor Loveday

Editorial Advisor, The Mint

Trevor has, for thirty years, reported and commented on regulation, markets and technology in a range of industries. Much of his career focus has been on the energy sector where he founded Utility Week, provided commentary through broadcast media and led communications at the energy regulator, Ofgem.

He has an extraordinary combination of experiences that inform his editorial approach. Since acquiring a doctorate in medical science and subsequent research positions including Guy and St Thomas’ Medical School, he has been a published professional musician and an exhibiting artist and illustrator before and while forging a reputation as a writer, editor and a communicator in the broadest sense.

He has written extensively on medicine (as editor of the Medical Research Council award-winning MRC News). As a freelance writer and consultant he advises global players in engineering, finance, IT and petrochemicals on communications and has edited the International Desalination Association’s quarterly publication and website.

He is managing editor and a founding director of The Water Report which has become the established leader in reporting and analysis on regulation and policy in the UK water sector.

Daphne Davies

Editor and Media Adviser

Daphne Davies has worked as a journalist and development consultant for 30 years, in the not-for profit, governmental, and think-tank fields. She started work as a printer in the UK, USA and Ecuador. When she returned to the UK, she was employed as a press officer for various organisations, including Amnesty International, and the Labour Research Department.

In the 1990s, she moved to Brussels to work for the international trade union movement, followed by work with WWF, the United Nations, the European Commission (mainly in social and economic policy) and a think tank: the European Policy Centre.

Since returning to the UK in 2010 she has worked with the Club of Rome, the European Commission, and as a freelance journalist, and set up a project to publicise the situation of civil society in Least Developed Countries.

She graduated in Philosophy and Theology (!) from Nottingham University, received an M.Litt. in Moral Philosophy from Glasgow University, and a Diploma in Social Administration from the LSE. Her current passions are climate change, sustainable development, social and economic policy and trade and development.

When not busy with these, she enjoys walking, playing music (violin and piano) and has recently started making patchworks and quilts.

Alex Beatty

Communications Assistant

Alex is an economics undergraduate at Goldsmiths and experienced bartender / whisk(e)y enthusiast. 

She also works with the Women in Economics initiative, carrying out research to improve gender diversity within the field, and is working with Goldsmiths to improve the appeal of economics to students who are people of colour, women, and/or state-educated. 

She is planning to continue her career with focusses on labour and climate economics, alongside furthering diversity in economic thought and conversation. Her other interests include learning to code, foreign languages, running, and playing the drums. 

Ardavan Tabrizi

Research Assistant

Ardavan is a second-year Economics & Management undergraduate student at King’s College London. He was born and raised in a developing country where the state of the economy was something that seemed to always be on everyone’s minds. Despite the large impact that the economy had on people’s lives, however, most people had very little knowledge of what economics actually was and many people didn’t even know that the study of the subject existed. He, therefore, hopes to help amplify peoples’ understanding of economics.