Katherine is a political economist, writer and advocate for economic system change. Her roles include writer-at-large at the University of Edinburgh, strategic advisor for the Centre for Policy Development, and economic strategy advisor to The Next Economy. She co-founded the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) and WEAll Scotland, its Scottish hub, and instigated the group of Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo).
Her board roles have included a range of groups such as the C40 Centre for Urban Climate Policy and Economy, the Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity, and The Democracy Collaborative. She is a thinker-in-residence at the Australian National University’s Planetary Health Hothouse, a new economics senior fellow at the ZOE Institute, a fellow of The Post Growth Institute, and a distinguished fellow of the Schumacher Institute. In 2022 she was named a woman making a difference in the charity sector by the UK’s Charity Times.
She has over eight years’ experience in various roles with Oxfam GB: as a senior researcher for the Global Research Team, UK policy manager, and research and policy advisor for Oxfam Scotland. She developed Oxfam’s Humankind Index and led Oxfam’s work on downscaling the ‘doughnut’ for various national contexts. Katherine has a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and Politics (University of Melbourne) and holds a PhD in Political Science from the Australian National University.
Her most recent book The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a Grown Up Economy (co-authored with Jeremy Williams and published by Policy Press) was published in January 2019 and her major report Being Bold: Budgeting for Children’s Wellbeing was launched in March 2021.
