I trained as a lawyer. I spent the first years of my career doing what lawyers do — advising companies, structuring transactions, managing disputes. Then, somewhere along the way, I stopped practising law and started doing something harder to explain.
Looking back now, I can see that roughly sixty per cent of my career has been spent in the public sector. I served as vice-minister of justice, as a human rights adviser to a head of state, as a regulator of public-private partnerships, and eventually as one of the architects of a legal and institutional framework for special economic zones — a project that consumed nearly a decade of my life and ended in a way I did not expect. How a corporate lawyer ends up advising on human rights, and how human rights connects to economic policy, is a story for another post. The short version is that nothing in public life stays in its lane.
That shift was not a plan. It was an accumulation of problems that needed solving and institutions that needed building, each one pulling me slightly further from the place I started. Along the way I studied at Oxford, Harvard, and IE Business School — not because I had a master plan, but because each gap in my knowledge became impossible to ignore. Economics, finance, politics, digital transformation, organisational strategy: I absorbed them the way most practitioners do, out of necessity rather than curiosity, and then the curiosity followed.
What This Blog Is
The topics I have spent my career working on — special economic zones, governance design, arbitration systems, institutional resilience, the relationship between law and development — rarely get discussed with the honesty they deserve. They tend to attract either uncritical enthusiasm or reflexive suspicion, and very little in between. I have been on the inside of at least one of these experiments. I watched it work. I watched it come under sustained political attack. I spent years thinking about why it survived anyway.
This blog is where I work through what all of that means. It is not a press release. It will not always be comfortable. But it will be honest — and it will try to be useful to anyone who has to navigate the intersection of law, governance, and economic reality in places where none of those things are simple.
The name of my company is Developing Concept. The title of this blog is My Developing Concepts. The logic is the same in both cases: ideas that are fixed are ideas that have stopped working. The moment a concept stops developing, it becomes a doctrine — and doctrines, in my experience, are where thinking goes to die.
How It Works
- Posts will appear at least every two weeks, normally on Sunday evenings — occasionally more frequently if something demands it.
- Each article will address a different topic, unless it is a direct continuation of the previous one. Threads will be clearly marked.
- Most posts will be original analysis. Occasionally I will share or engage with third-party work when it is worth the attention.
- I will do my best to keep posts under 1,200 words. Brevity is a discipline, not a limitation.
- Politics will appear here, because it is impossible to discuss governance honestly without it. Partisan ideology will not — or at least not intentionally. Call me out if I slip.
- I welcome challenge, correction, and disagreement — they are the only way these concepts keep developing. If something I write is wrong, incomplete, or worth arguing about, get in touch directly. I will respond when a response adds something to the conversation.
I have spent most of my career trying to build things that last in environments that make that very difficult. Some of what I built held. Some of it did not. What follows is my attempt to think clearly about why — and about what the people who come after might do differently. That is the only honest reason to write anything.
Welcome to My Developing Concepts.
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