I work across Aotearoa New Zealand on questions of housing, infrastructure, retirement systems, climate transition and social cohesion. My work is based in mesoeconomics, with a focus on the institutional and infrastructural contexts through which economic and social life is organised.

I’m interested in how people and institutions co-create collective life, and how we understand our relationships through time and with the world.

I think often in the context of Gillian Rose’s writing about “the broken middle”, a pragmatic realm of society where diverse needs clash. This requires sustained “reflection on boundaries”, she says. A city is a geography mediated by elements of past, future, an active present, dwellings, and the material-economic base which runs through each.

Much of my work asks how public, private and common-world institutions might better inhabit this broken middle. I write a lot about technocracy and how public policy can distribute responsibility in ways that expand people’s agency in the social commons. I am very interested in the role of art and literature in shaping economic thought and values, and in how economics as a field might free its fealty to technical forms.

I regularly work with interns entering economic policy for the first time and love finding meaningful ways to include younger people in my work. If you are early in your career and interested, please reach out. I’m always happy to see whether there is a way to involve you in a current or upcoming project.

I live in Canada, but continue to work extensively on economic and social policy challenges in Aotearoa New Zealand.

You can contact me via:
email: rosiejwcollins@gmail.com
linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rosiejcollins