Policy Stories

Councils and advisory boards

• Camden Renewal Commission
  Between 2020 and 2022, Professor Mazzucato and Georgia Gould, Leader of Camden Council, co-chaired the Camden Renewal Commission, which brought together a top team of community, business and academic leaders to catalyse Camden’s renewal and spur its recovery from COVID-19. The Commission developed a set of four missions and published a key report to tackle the borough’s most pressing challenges.
• Council on Urban Initiatives
  Launched in November 2021, the Council on Urban Initiatives is an independent body established in collaboration between UN-Habitat, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) and LSE Cities at the London School of Economics. As Co-Chair alongside Professor Ricky Burdett, Professor Mazzucato leads an international group of eighteen pioneering mayors, practitioners, activists and academics, to rethink how we use the COVID-19 pandemic as an ‘opportunity to reflect and reset how we live, interact, and rebuild our cities’. The Council’s mission is to advocate for the power of cities to promote systemic change to achieve the goal of the green, just and healthy city.
• European Space Agency High-Level Advisory Group
  The European Space Agency’s (ESA) High-Level Advisory Group on Human and Robotic Space Exploration for Europe launched in July 2022 and will provide ESA’s decision-makers with an independent and objective high-level assessment regarding the geopolitical, economic and societal relevance of human and robotic space exploration for Europe, and recommended options for a way forward. The group, which contains political figures including a former prime minister, as well as economists, academics and an explorer, reports directly to ESA’s Director General, Josef Aschbacher. In her most recent book, Mission Economy, Professor Mazzucato uses NASA’s Apollo missions throughout the 1960s as a case to explore the opportunities around leveraging mission-oriented policy to tackle our biggest challenges.
• Global Commission on the Economics of Water
  The Global Commission on the Economics of Water is changing the way we value, finance, and govern water as a global common good. It is co-chaired by a dream team of global policy makers and thought leaders, including Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, and Professor, Dr Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Following from Nicolas Stern’s Review on the Economics of Climate Change and Partha Dasgupta’s Review on the Economics of Biodiversity, it is writing an independent global review on the Economics of Water and Beyond, representing the third piece in this broader environmental trilogy.
• Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisors
  Between 2015 and 2019, Professor Mazzucato was a member of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s Council of Economic Advisors, which was tasked with improving the competitiveness of the Scottish economy and tackling inequality within Scotland. Professor Mazzucato worked closely with the First Minister to develop a new mission-oriented Scottish National Investment Bank, which today has a mandate to distribute £2 billion in funding to tackle the country’s key climate and inclusion goals. 
• South Africa’s Presidential Economic Advisory Council
  In 2019, President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed Professor Mazzucato as a member of his Presidential Economic Advisory Council for a five-year term. The Council is a non-statutory and independent body chaired by the President and brings together prominent economists and technical experts drawn from academia, the private sector, labour, community, think tanks and other constituencies. The most important task of the council is to build a capable state with a view to implement new policy approaches, including a green industrial strategy. 
• UN High Level Advisory Board for Economic and Social Affairs
  Since 2021, Professor Mazzucato has been a member of the UN’s High Level Advisory Board (HLAB) for Economic and Social Affairs. The Board, which reports to Li Junhua, the Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, has provided advice to the United Nations on broad economic and social issues, including near-term prospects and risks for the world economy, frontier technologies, inequality, migration, issues associated with countries in special situations. The body is a key part of efforts to enhance support to Member States of the United Nations in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
• WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All
  Professor Mazzucato is chair of the all-women council which brings together leading economists and health experts to rethink how value in health and wellbeing is measured, produced and distributed across the economy. The Council is creating a body of work that sees investment in local and global health systems as an investment in the future, not as a short-term cost, to make our economies more healthy, inclusive and sustainable. The Council has published four high-level briefs and statements that have been released at the G7, G20 and COP meetings.
• World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Future Council on the New Agenda for Economic Growth and Recovery
  Since January 2021, Professor Mariana Mazzucato and Rajiv Shah, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, have served as Co-Chairs of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Future Council (GFC) on the New Agenda for Economic Growth and Recovery. This council represents one of 40 GFCs, a network that convenes more than a thousand of the most relevant and knowledgeable thought leaders in academia, government, international organisations and civil society. Alongside Professor Mariana Mazzucato and Dr Shah, the council boasts the likes of Professor Laura D’Andrea Tyson, former chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, and Professor Ian Goldin, former vice-president of the World Bank.