June Sekera is a public policy practitioner and researcher whose work and publications are focused on the public economy and public goods production. At the New School, Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, she is director of the Public Economy Project where her work includes the topic areas of collective choice, collective finance, re-thinking the measurement of public sector production and the role of government in climate change mitigation.
Founder and director of the Public Goods Institute, June is also Research Fellow at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London where she helps lead the institute’s Public Value/Public Purpose initiative, and a Research Fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. Author of The Public Economy in Crisis; A Call for a New Public Economics (2016), she has published a wide range of papers on the public economy and public goods.
For over twenty years, June held programmatic, leadership and management positions at federal, state and local levels of government. Her fields of specialty included workforce training and labor market policy, adult education, employee ownership and community economic development. June has consulted to national, state and local government and non-profit organizations on policy development, program design, performance measurement, program evaluation and strategic planning. Her economics training was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (MPA, 1984).
At the Heilbroner Center, June initiated and is leading a project on “Climate Change and Collective Need,” focused on public policy with regard to one particular form of climate change intervention: atmospheric carbon reduction.
With funding from the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the two-phase project on carbon dioxide removal began with an investigation of the scientific literature on mechanical carbon removal methods. The purpose was to evaluate the effectiveness of these methods using a standard of “collective biophysical need”. New School PhD candidate Andreas Lichtenberger and RA on the project aided in conducting the research and evaluating various carbon removal systems. The result of their research was published in 2020 in Biophysical Economics and Sustainability: “Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science and Societal Need; A review of the literature on industrial carbon removal.” The findings included the discovery that, in the U.S., federal and state governments are offering subsidies for mechanical carbon removal methods that emit more CO2 into the air than they remove. The second phase of the project is underway – a comparison of mechanical carbon removal with biological sequestration based on the methods’ relative effectiveness, efficiency and collateral consequences.
This project builds upon June’s work on public economy theory and its integration with biophysical economics, published in “Missing from the Mainstream: The Biophysical Basis of Production and the Public Economy” (Sekera 2017).