GDP Launch Meeting Core Group Bios
Ragnar Ängeby -- Swedish Ambassador Ragnar Ängeby’s professional career includes diplomatic and policy-making activities in the fields of commerce, development assistance and politics including military security policy and disarmament. He has been a desk officer for China, and countries in Central America, Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union. In the early seventies he was also involved in trade promotion as an officer of the Swedish Trade Council. In the late seventies he helped to integrate the trade and the aid agendas into the Government’s development co-operation policy including policies on technical co-operation and the establishment of a soft loan facility for low-income countries.
Ängeby has been negotiator in the CSCE process and in the 1980s was an analyst of east-west relations and strategic issues, including the nuclear and conventional military balance and disarmament. He also served as a secretary to the Advisory Group on Security Policy of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. From posts abroad, he has also reported on domestic and international politics and trade policies, on EU affairs and on security policy.
Ängeby established a Secretariat for Conflict Prevention in July 1999, following the launch of "Preventing Violent Conflict – A Swedish Action Plan" in the presence of the UN Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi Annan, and the Swedish Prime Minister, Mr Göran Persson. From 1997 to 2001 he was also Deputy Head of the Policy Planning Group, where he coordinated the development of the Swedish policy for Conflict Prevention.
Ambassador Ängeby was born in 1945, in Lund, Sweden. He received a B.A. in Philosophy and Linguistics from the University of Lund, Sweden, in 1970. He speaks English, Spanish, Russian, French and German. He has written or coordinated articles, speeches and publications on several topics related to different aspects of Swedish Foreign Policy, in recent years particularly on Conflict Prevention. He is married and has four children, three sons and one daughter.
Elena Díez Pinto -- Elena Díez Pinto is currently Chief Technical Advisor of a UNDP project to strengthen democratic governance in Latin America and the Caribbean through democratic dialogue and knowledge-creation projects. Elena has eleven years of professional experience in development, working for organizations in Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Paraguay, the USA and Bolivia (IDB, World Bank, German Technical Cooperation, UNIDO, PLAN International, and USAID).
Elena was the Executive Director of Visión Guatemala, a multi-stakeholder dialogue process in which 42 prominent leaders drawn from all sectors of society participated to build a shared understanding of the country’s reality and a vision. This process stimulated strategic thinking and contributed to the debate of important dimensions of Guatemala’s development agenda. She was also an advisor to the National Secretariat of Planning and to Guatemala’s Social Cabinet, where she helped design social policy and strengthen local governments. As an officer for the UNPD Elena formulated, evaluated and managed peace and reconciliation and poverty alleviation programs and projects. She has written several public policy and technical documents, evaluation papers and newspaper articles, compiled a book on managing sustainable human development and recently produced two learning histories of civic scenario projects.
Elena has a BEng from San Carlos University in Guatemala and an MSc in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University. She undertook her Ph.D. work (all but dissertation) in economic development planning at MIT.
Mari Fitzduff -- Mari is currently Professor and Director of the international MA program in Coexistence and Conflict at Brandeis University, in Boston, USA (http://www.brandeis.edu/programs/Slifka). From 1997-2003, she held a Chair of Conflict Studies at the University of Ulster where she was Director of UNU/INCORE (www.incore.ulst.ac.uk) which addresses the management of ethnic, political and religious conflict through an integrated approach using research, training, policy, program and practice development. From 1990-1997 she was Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council (http://www.community-relations.org.uk/) which works with government, statutory bodies, trade unions, churches, community groups, security groups, ex-prisoners, businesses and politicians, developing programs and training to address issues of conflict resolution in Northern Ireland.
Mari has also worked on programs addressing conflict issues in the Basque Country, Sri Lanka, Middle East and Indonesia, and is utilized as an international expert by many governments and international organizations on issues of conflict and coexistence. Her publications include 'Beyond Violence' - Conflict Resolution Processes in Northern Ireland (2002), published by the United Nations University Press/Brookings, which was winner of an American Library Notable Publications Award; Community Conflict Skills, which was first published in 1988 and is now in its 4th edition; and the recently published NGO’s at the Table, Rowan and Littlefield, Maryland (2004). Her next publication The Psychology of Global Conflicts: From War to Peace, which she is co-editing with Chris Stout, is a 3 volume series to be published by Praegar Press in Fall 2005.
Minu Hemmati -- Minu's interests focus on the fundamental cultural shift from domination and conflict towards equity and collaboration. As a psychologist, Minu focuses on the contributions that individuals can make to societal change, and the links between individual perspectives and behaviour and group processes.
Minu designed and coordinated Stakeholder Action for Our Common Future, held in Johannesburg in 2002 immediately prior to the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Since 2003, Minu has served as a senior advisor to the SEED Initiative, which promotes and supports locally driven, entrepreneurial partnerships for sustainable development, in coordination with UNEP, UNDP, IUCN, the Global Public Policy Institute, and PartnershipsCentral, and with the support of the governments of Germany, The Netherlands, the US, Norway, the UK, and Swiss Re.
Minu is also a Member of the Jury of the ReSource International Award for Sustainable Watershed Management (Swiss Re); a Member of the Independent Expert Panel to the Global Accountability Project (One World Trust, UK); and a Member of the Board of Directors of EcoAgriculture Partners. She is also contributing to a research programme on Innovative and Participatory Governance in the Knowledge Society.
Minu has published over 50 articles, reports and book chapters, and two books on social identity; environmental psychology issues; women / gender issues; and multi-stakeholder dialogues and partnerships. Her most recent book is Multistakeholder Processes for Governance and Sustainability (2002). Her next book will focus on the psychological aspects of stakeholder dialogue and collaboration.
From 1992 to 1998, Minu was a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Saarland (Germany) in the Department of Social Psychology and Women's Studies. Her work focused on social, organisational, and environmental psychology and women/gender studies. She completed her doctorate in social and economic sciences in 1991. Minu was born to a German mother and an Iranian father, and grew up in Germany.
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Adam Kahane -- Adam Kahane is a founding partner of Generon Consulting and of the Global Leadership Initiative. He is a leading designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can solve their toughest, most complex problems. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.
Adam is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (2004). Nelson Mandela said: “This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created.”
During the early 1990s, Adam was head of Social, Political, Economic and Technological Scenarios for Royal Dutch/Shell in London. Previously he held strategy and research positions with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (San Francisco), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Paris), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Vienna), the Institute for Energy Economics (Tokyo), and the Universities of Toronto, British Columbia, California, and the Western Cape.
In 1991 and 1992, Adam facilitated the Mont Fleur Scenario Project, in which a diverse group of South Africans worked together to effect the transition to democracy. Since then he has led many such seminal multi-stakeholder dialogue-and-action processes, throughout the world.
Adam has a B.Sc. in Physics (First Class Honors) from McGill University (Montreal), an M.A. in Energy and Resource Economics from the University of California (Berkeley), and an M.A. in Applied Behavioral Science from Bastyr University (Seattle). He has also studied negotiation at Harvard Law School and cello performance at Institut Marguerite-Bourgeoys. Originally from Montreal, he lives in Boston and Cape Town with his wife Dorothy and their family.
Business Background
- Long time partner of B.Grimm, a 130-year-old South-East Asian diversified industrial and investor and venture capitalist in companies pursuing social and environmental goals.
Corporate Social & Environmental Responsibility Background
- Recognizing the significant power of business to either threaten or support social and environmental sustainability,Walter became a pioneer in the international movement to promote Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility (CSR).
- Co-founder and former board chair of the Social Venture Network Europe (SVN Europe).
- Co-founder EMPRESA, with 12 organizations, the largest network of CSR business organizations in The Americas.
- Extensive work with UN, European Union and Civil Society on CSR and other issues.
Civil Society Activities and Reinventing Civilization:
- Work with many civil society organizations on other topics, incl. Human Rights Watch, for whom he helped to create the Brussels European Union office
- Co-founded with John Naisbitt and Tom Valente The Global Academy, which he chairs, with institutes working on CSR/SRI, Social and Environmental Sustainability, Human Rights, Integrative Medicine, Human Genome Technology, Transformative Education and Leadership Practices, organizing internationally education programs, networking and action projects.
- In his action research Walter recognized that these diverse sector related movements are in fact integral parts of a gradual reinvention of our fundamentally unsustainable mainstream civilization. Walter is describing this in the upcoming book with the working title Inspired Pragmatism – Leading beyond the Industrial Information Society towards a Sustainable Wisdom Civilization.
Leadership, Dialogue, Facilitation and Consciousness Work
- Developed and taught many educational programs, designed and facilitated many debates, dialogues and conferences on a broad variety of topics and in diverse multiple stakeholder contexts.
- Co-chair for sustainability and professor for sustainable business and leadership, in the first fully accredited MBA in Sustainable Management, which he co-designed at Presidio School of Management, San Francisco, where he also chairs the board’s program committee.
- Co-founder and executive co-chair of the Global Leadership Network, a global network of dialogue, facilitation, conflict resolution and leadership experts, with whom he is presently co-editing a book with the working title Leadership is Global.
- Steering committee for the Generative Dialogue Project.
- Works internationally as a coach and advisor to clients.
- Experienced practitioner, meditation teacher and spiritual counselor.
- Co-founder W.E. bringing countless people from East and West Block together for consciousness and peace related events.
- Formerly/presently board member of Naropa University, Omega Institute, IONS.
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Jim Woodhill -- Jim Woodhill is currently Head of the Social Economic Department at the International Agricultural Centre (IAC) within Wageningen University Research Centre (WUR), the Netherlands. Prior to this, he worked with the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in Eastern and Southern Africa and at a global level in supporting improved programme design and monitoring and evaluation from an organisational learning perspective. He has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia and has skills in facilitating participatory learning and systems orientated development processes.
Jim also has extensive experience in watershed management and community based natural resource management programmes, having worked closely with the development of Landcare and catchment management in Australia. He has worked as the National Manager of Policy and Programme Development for Greening Australia, one of Australia’s larger environmental NGOs. During this time he led a project that reviewed sustainable regional development initiatives across Australia and produced a facilitation resource kit.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s he lectured at the University of Western Sydney – Hawkesbury in systems agriculture and natural resources management. The faculty was internationally recognised for its innovative curriculum for equipping graduates to be facilitators of social and organisational change. Related to this work, Jim has a strong interest in experiential education and has also worked as a senior instructor for the Australian Outward Bound Foundation (an organisation that uses wilderness and adventure experiences for personal development and team building). Jim has accumulated over 20 years experience in the design and facilitation interactive planning, learning and training activities in a diverse range of sectoral, organisational and cultural contexts.
Jim trained as an agricultural scientist and completed his postgraduate study in the political economics of natural resources management with a particular focus on social learning in the context of globalisation. Jim’s professional experience has been complemented by the practical experience management of a family farm.