James Drummond

James Drummond is a public policy professional with over a decade of experience at the international level, specialising in behavioural insights (BI) and regulatory reform. His work looks at the behavioural barriers and biases that stop regulatory reforms from having their intended impact. He co-authored an OECD Working Paper mapping these barriers and biases, and an article in the European Journal of Risk Regulation applying this mapping to regulatory impact assessment (RIA). A forthcoming OECD Working Paper presents the results of using this approach to diagnose behavioural issues in the RIA process in the Slovak Republic. At the Grantham Research Institute, he is extending this work to climate adaptation.

James is Deputy Head of the Regulatory Management and Performance Unit in the OECD Regulatory Policy Division, where he has led the Division’s work on BI since 2019. He has worked with over a dozen governments on diagnosing and implementing regulatory reforms, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa and Southeast Asia, and has authored or co-authored over 20 publications, from country reviews to forward-looking policy research, including on the regulation of artificial intelligence.

Background

James holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Toronto, a Master of Arts in Political Science from Carleton University, and a Bachelor of Social Science in Political Science from the University of Ottawa. In 2023, he was a Policy Leader Fellow at the School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute. Before joining the OECD, he worked for the Government of Ontario in 2014 as a policy analyst in the Ministry of Labour, supporting regulatory processes under the Occupational Health and Safety Act.