Dr Fred Amonya PhD CEng FCIHT

• Doctoral Research: University of London, PhD Policy Science
• Thesis: Excitation of a Dynamical System: Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) in the Non Ergodic Uganda
• University of Birmingham, MSc (Distinction), Road Management and Engineering
• Harvard University, Graduate Module (Investment Banking and Structured Finance)
• Makerere University, BSc (Civil Engineering)

Dr Amonya is a scholar on complexity and public investment. For over two decades, he has taught and advised on infrastructure and public policy across the world. He was Chair, Transport Systems Economics, PIARC, 2016/9. In that role, he led policy makers and academics in attempting to understand transport investment in 122 countries by constructing their policy spaces as dynamical systems. Earlier, he led the governance theme of a UK development programme called Global Transport Knowledge Partnership that sought to bridge the chasm between policymaking and universities of Africa and South-East Asia. He worked for Mott MacDonald (2007/10), advising on PPP around the world. Earlier, he worked for Scott Wilson (now AECOM) in association with the University of Nottingham, guiding infrastructure asset management across the world.

Now, he advises Fortune 500 companies in London and other cities on corporate strategy in the era of net zero. In addition, he is assisting African countries in knitting their post-Covid policies. He also guides dialogue on PPP as a member of UNECE team of PPP experts. He advises on infrastructure and complexity under Lyciar.

He is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow CIHT, and he holds a PhD in policy science. A few of his lectures are captured on Dr Amonya's ResearchGate profile. Please also see his commentary on his LinkedIn profile.

Dr Amonya studies infrastructure and public investment as complex adaptive systems. His central concern is what happens when the conventional assumptions of equilibrium, separability and predictable cause and effect are relaxed. Infrastructure then ceases to be simply a collection of physical assets or projects to be optimised. It becomes part of a dynamic human system in which the state, market and society continuously act upon one another, generating feedback, adaptation, novelty and occasionally instability.

His research therefore seeks a stronger mathematical foundation for infrastructure and policy. He draws from dynamical systems, information theory, network theory, statistical mechanics and the calculus of variations to examine questions normally treated through engineering judgement, economics or institutional narrative alone. Public investment can be read on a Hamiltonian frame. PPP can be examined as a Lagrangian problem concerned with possible trajectories through institutional and economic space. Lyapunov stability provides a language for asking whether disturbances dissipate or accumulate. Shannon entropy and information gradients provide ways of thinking about how rapidly changing information strains the norms, trust and institutional structures through which societies coordinate themselves.

This mathematics is not introduced as decoration. Its purpose is to expose assumptions that conventional appraisal frequently leaves hidden. Cost-benefit analysis remains useful, but it represents only one reduction of a much larger system. The deeper problem is how societies navigate strongly non-linear and non-ergodic environments in which the intervention itself changes subsequent possibilities. This has led his work from optimisation towards navigation, from projects towards fields and networks, and from infrastructure as an object towards infrastructure as an operator on society.

A recurring object in this research is the city. Cities concentrate physical networks, institutions, people, capital, information and political power. Sustainability, resilience, congestion, accessibility and growth are consequently treated not merely as policy heuristics but as properties emerging from an evolving topology. His work asks how these properties might be mathematised without stripping away the human relationships that produce them.

The empirical terrain ranges from Britain to Africa, with particular attention to infrastructure finance, transport networks, cities and institutional development. Climate change, digitalisation and the emergence of AI are treated as major excitations of an already complex system, rather than as external subjects to be appended to conventional infrastructure analysis. Across this work runs one question: how can public institutions sense, learn and steer when the world they are attempting to govern is itself changing?

Dr Amonya's wider academic and professional work is built around the research-policy-practice interface. For more than two decades he has worked between universities, governments, international organisations, engineering practice and private finance, using each arena to test the assumptions of the others. The objective is not simply to transfer academic knowledge into policy, but to allow problems encountered in practice to reshape the questions asked by scholarship.

His international leadership in transport economics has been particularly important to this work. He served first as Technical Secretary and later, from 2016 to 2019, as Chair of Transport Systems Economics at the World Road Association, PIARC. The committee brought together policymakers, practitioners and academics working across PIARC's international membership and confronted the difficulty of comparing transport investment in radically different institutional, economic and social environments. That experience strengthened his interest in understanding policy spaces as dynamical systems rather than assuming that one institutional model travels unchanged between countries.

He has also contributed for many years to the UNECE community of PPP experts, examining how public-private partnership can be designed around public purpose rather than treated merely as a financing transaction. Earlier, through the UK's Global Transport Knowledge Partnership, he led work intended to narrow the distance between transport research and policymaking in Africa and Asia. His work has also included engagement with the World Bank on strengthening applied science, engineering and technology in Africa and participation as a reviewer of the IPCC Working Group III assessment process.

Teaching forms another part of this interface. For four years he taught a sustained sequence on Infrastructure and Complexity at UCL, taking graduate students from the challenge of infrastructure in Africa, through the limitations of inherited heuristics, to questions of institutional trust and mathematical structure. He continues to engage graduate schools and research communities on complexity, infrastructure, PPP and public policy, with particular interest in helping students cross the artificial boundaries between engineering, economics, mathematics and the social sciences.

He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation, and has served on the Institution's Council. These professional activities complement rather than sit apart from his research. Engineering provides the physical system, economics the allocation problem, institutions the organising fabric and complexity science the frame within which their interaction can be studied together.