Trey Goff

Trey Goff is Chief of Staff at Próspera, the charter-city project on the Honduran island of Roatán, where he leads public policy and institutional design. He writes and speaks widely on special jurisdictions and governance innovation, and authored a peer-reviewed study of the governance structure of Honduras’s first ZEDE.

He was Próspera’s first full-time employee and has been with the project since before there was anything to show a visitor, which makes him one of the few people who can describe a charter city’s institutional design from the inside rather than from a paper. He read economics and political science at Mississippi State University.

His work covers public affairs as well as policy: drafting and refining the zone’s regulations, and defending them since Honduras repealed the ZEDE statute. He has written on whether it is possible to design a constitution that genuinely binds the government it creates, which is the practical question a new jurisdiction faces on its first day and the one most existing constitutions have answered badly.

He speaks widely on special jurisdictions, and argues that the movement’s bottleneck is not ideas but execution: somebody has to secure the legal framework, and then somebody has to build.