Creative thinking
for a better tomorrow.
Our focus
At Public Interest we imagine new ways of delivering on national and global public needs. We help governments, international organisations, businesses and civil society to make sense of the world, and shape it for the better.
Our approach
Public Interest is a research and policy platform staffed by a network of experts, writers, and strategists dedicated to rethinking the common good. We believe that empowered and productive citizens need well-functioning national and international institutions to sustain them. We work on projects that enhance shared prosperity and the capacity of inclusive societies to tackle the challenges of our time.
Projects.
Global Public Investment.
Public Interest has been one of the lead organisations driving the Global Public Investment agenda. We firmly believe that a better, more equitable world also needs a better system for raising and distributing international public money. Our engagements on GPI span from the UN system to regional investment banks to multilateral replenishments to civil society coalitions. We are a proud member of the Global Public Investment Network (GPIN) cofounded by our Executive Director.
Effective Multilateralism.
At a time of geopolitical and geoeconomic crisis we need new arguments for the common good and new political frameworks that can bring nations and peoples together. At Public Interest we combine macro-economic insight and strategic foresight to inform some of the defining policy discussions of our time, including the recent UN Secretary General’s High Level Advisory Board (HLAB) on Effective Multilateralism. See the backgrounder paper, The Global Financial Architecture as a Global Public Good, written for the HLAB by Simon Reid-Henry here.
Pandemic Politics.
We think health plays a special role in questions of justice, but we also know that politics is at the heart of questions of health. Certainly politics was behind the uneven spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the inequitable scientific and institutional responses to it. Our team has decades of experience in the global health field. We worked with over 100 civil society groups to successfully advocate for a more democratic and inclusive pandemic fund when the World Bank first proposed such a vehicle in 2022. We also proposed that such a fund adopt the principles of GPI in this piece in The Lancet.
Rethinking Democracy.
Democracy is in crisis, or so we are told. What, then, can we do to nourish and to reimagine the democratic tradition in light of the needs of our time? Our work seeks ways to restore and to rebuild democratic institutions, be it via the architecture of modern media or through finding new ways to access the people’s voice at the local and the international scale alike. We have worked via national partners, such as Counterpoint, on their Toward Belonging project and support international actors, such as IFPIM, on their mission to ensure a functioning public media landscape in the most challenging of places.
Digital Commons / Public Goods.
Knowledge is the perhaps the most precious global public good of all. In March 2023 our Director spoke at the inaugural MOST forum, hosted by UNESCO in Paris, on some of the ways our work seeks to put the insights of social science at the service of democratically-informed policy making and civil society activism. In June we supported an important intervention into the need for transparency and guarantees of access to big tech’s online platforms for researchers.