Prestige Lecture 2024: The Politics of Projects | Professor Ben Ansell

With a record-breaking 50+ countries across the globe having elections in 2024 involving more than 2bn people in what Time Magazine called the ‘Ultimate Election Year’, the Major Projects Association chose the “politics of projects” as the topic for the 2024 Prestige Lecture.

Hot off the back of giving the annual Reith Lectures, Professor Ben Ansell stepped up to the task of helping us tackle the challenge of politics head on. With impeccable timing, our lecture was bang in the middle of the UK General election, with three weeks down and three weeks to go to polling day.

Ben Ansell is Professor Comparative Democratic Institutions at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College. In 2023, he was the BBC’s annual Reith Lecturer, giving lectures based on his book Why Politics Fails, published by Penguin in the UK and translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. He is the author of one of the UK’s most read Substacks on politics: Political Calculus. Ben received his PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2006 and taught at the University of Minnesota before arriving in Oxford.

This is the full recording of the Major Projects Association Prestige Lecture held on 11th June 2024 at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London. With an introduction by Andy Murray, Executive Director and Emma Howard Boyd CBE, Chair of the Major Projects Association, the lecture is followed by a Q&A sessions with members in the audience.