Bertie joined the Wales Institute for Social and Economic Research and Data as a Research Associate in 2020. He completed his PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of Leeds between 2008-2012, with research focused on post-politics and the climate justice movement. Following a 30-month teaching position at the University of Liverpool, he joined the University of Salford in 2016 as a research associate on the ESRC project Jam & Justice: Co-Producing Urban Governance for Social Innovation. Moving to the University of Sheffield’s Urban Institute, he was additionally a research associate as part MISTRA Urban Futures’ Realising Just Cities programme, with a focus on elite understandings of meaningful participation in Gothenburg and the Greater Manchester city region.
Bertie’s research interests focus on new municipalism, hybrid models of ownership, the politics of scale, and new approaches to decentralised forms of participation. This research includes the development of Public-Common Partnerships as a transformative institutional framework for the democratic expansion of the foundational economy.
His current research is an international comparative study of stakeholder and civil society organizational involvement in local economic developments based on the concept of the ‘Foundational Economy’. The research will include cases from Wales, the UK and Europe. He is also an editor at Red Pepper magazine and an active member of the Minim municipalist observatory.
