Jen Nelles

Jen is a senior research fellow with the Innovation Caucus at Oxford Brookes University and holds a visiting professorship with the Networks and Governance Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago. She specializes in the areas of innovation and productivity policy, urban and metropolitan governance, regional economic development, infrastructure, and system dynamics.

Her work focuses on regional governance organizations and their abilities to coordinate policy across jurisdictional boundaries. Her most recent book takes a close look at one of these, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, to understand how entrepreneurial intergovernmental organizations succeed and fail in fragmented political environments. Her scholarship on Regional Intergovernmental Organizations (RIGOs), convened through Project RIGO, continues to try to change bring nuance and new perspectives to the dialogue on regional governance in the United States. All of this research intersects with her work with the RSA Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR), which she co-directs with Michael Glass (University of Pittsburgh) and J P Addie (Georgia State University). This network, and the research that it supports, places the region at the center of the ‘infrastructural turn’ and reflects both the increased conceptual, geographic, and political importance of infrastructure and the endemic crises of access (social space), expertise (technology), and resources (governance) that varied provision of infrastructures within regions can cause.

She has written several books including Comparative Metropolitan Policy: Governing Beyond Boundaries in the Imagined Metropolis (Routledge 2012); A Quiet Evolution: The Emergence of Indigenous-Local Intergovernmental Partnerships in Canada (University of Toronto Press 2016); Discovering American Regionalism: An Introduction to Regional Intergovernmental Organizations (Routledge 2019); and Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York (Michigan University Press 2023).