Speakers

Anne Davies is Professor of Law and Public Policy and a Fellow of Brasenose College. She studied at Oxford, completing the BA (winning the Gibbs and Martin Wronker Prizes) and the D.Phil. She was a Prize Fellow at All Souls College from 1995 to 2001, and the Garrick Fellow and Tutor in Law at Brasenose College from 2001 to 2015. From 2015-2020 she was Dean of the Oxford Law Faculty.

Professor Davies is the author of five books and numerous articles in the fields of public law and labour law. In public law, she has a particular interest in government contracts. Her D.Phil. thesis examined the phenomenon of contractualisation in the UK National Health Service from a public law perspective. She developed this research into a book entitled Accountability: A Public Law Analysis of Government by Contract which was published by Oxford University Press in 2001. Her book The Public Law of Government Contracts, a wider examination of public procurement and public/private partnership contracts from a public law perspective, was published by OUP in 2008. She continues to write about government contracts and public service delivery more generally, and chairs the Oxford POGO Club for the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford.

The Open Contracting Partnership is a silo-busting collaboration across government, business, civil society and technologists to open up and transform government contracting worldwide to make it better and fairer. OCP works in over 30 countries around the world to bring open data and open government together to make sure public money is spent openly, fairly and effectively.

Before joining the Open Contracting Partnership, Gavin was Director of Campaigns and then Executive Director of Global Witness. He oversaw the organization’s groundbreaking and award-winning investigative, campaigning and advocacy work uncovering secret deals, corruption and conflict around the world. He helped create the international Publish What You Pay campaign and helped negotiate the intergovernmental Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative that brings together oil and mining companies, home- and host-governments and civil society to improve disclosure and oversight of over $1 trillion dollars of oil and mining money.

He is an expert on illicit financial flows, and helped lead global efforts to end the abuse of anonymous shell companies for money laundering and financial crime, including working with the British government’s recent presidency of the G8 and the Open Government Partnership. He has a Doctorate from the University of Reading and has worked with Chatham House in London and the United National Environmental Programme in the past on analyzing and investigating global environmental crime. Gavin is a 2021 Fellow of World Commerce & Contracting for making a significant contributions to the development of commercial and contract management.

Jasmina is passionate about citizen-centred accountability and has led Integrity Action since 2016, transforming it into a globally recognised organisation in this space. She has driven a shift toward models that put communities in charge of identifying problems and tracking solutions, ensuring accountability is grounded in people’s lived experiences.

With a background in international development, she has worked on programmes spanning social welfare, poverty reduction, and economic empowerment. Jasmina believes in justice through meaningful participation and local ownership. She also serves as a trustee of Bond and Anti-Human Trafficking Action.

Sarah Stonbely (Ph.D., New York University, 2015) is a researcher who focuses on the journalism field, civic media, local news ecosystems, and media policy. She is currently a senior research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, New York, where she is leading research on local journalism. Sarah is looking at how researchers, funders, and publishers themselves can expand the definition of local news to include the myriad ways people meet critical information needs now.

Before joining the Tow Center, Sarah served as the director of the State of Local News Project at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she co-authored, with Penny Abernathy, the 2023 report. Prior to that, Sarah served as the research director for the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, where she produced white papers and research reports on collaborative journalism, the effects on content of changing media ownership, media policy, ethnic and community media, and the structural correlates of local news provision. She also led impact evaluation for the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a first-in-the-nation public funding mechanism to support news and information initiatives in the state.