David Fell

David Fell co-founded Brook Lyndhurst and remains one of its directors. He is an economist with more than 20 years’ research and strategy experience.

David’s professional work focuses on four themes: sustainability; strategy; behaviour change; and facilitation. The London Food Strategy illustrates all four of these. David led the conceptualisation, development, drafting and delivery of the London Food Strategy, a process that involved extensive background research, deep analysis and complex stakeholder engagement. David’s ability to synthesise large volumes of information, often from widely different sources, and to present and discuss research findings and implications, is a key skill.

David is also regularly involved in difficult, challenging or highly novel research and policy questions. He has led studies exploring environmental inequalities; the nature of a ‘green economy’; the relationship between sustainability and competitiveness; how future lifestyles might impact on the environment; how the public’s understanding of climate change does or does not feed through to their everyday behaviours; and how government departments conceptualise and manage risk. He is particularly interested in the processes by which change diffuses through populations, and has led a series of Defra-funded studies investigating how the uptake of pro-environmental behaviours might be accelerated.

Before setting up Brook Lyndhurst, David was director of economic development with EDAW; director with Business Strategies Ltd (now part of Experian); and a researcher with PMA. He has a degree in economics from Cambridge. He established and ran the London First Sustainability Unit; he served as a Commissioner on the London Sustainable Development Commission; and is a Fellow of the RSA.

David has recently been appointed as an associate of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR). Part of the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge, 4CMR is dedicated to finding paths forward to reduce the risks of climate change and improve sustainability while allowing for a vibrant global economy.

David is also: chair of governors at a London primary school; an avid reader of books that none of his colleagues have heard of; father to two teenage boys each with a serious cricket habit; and desperately trying to finish writing a book.