Leadership

Our leaders are responsible for delivering IIED’s strategy and key organisational objectives and they meet regularly to make sure we're staying on track. Their experience spans diverse research areas ranging from forestry to communications research to governance. Many leaders are part of one or both of IIED’s teams that oversee our strategic and management work. IIED’s strategy team is responsible for delivering our strategy and the cross-cutting institutional priority on governance for sustainable development. The management team has responsibility for the organisational systems essential to deliver on our strategy.

 

Steve Bass is Head of the Sustainable Markets Group, responsible for IIED’s work in economics, business and market governance mechanisms. He has been leading our work on green economies, co-founding the Green Economy Coalition, scoping the OECD’s approach in developing countries, and working on the UNEP Green Economy Report. He chairs the UK’s 7-year research programmeon Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation, advises the UN Poverty-Environment Initiative and is a Fellow of both WWF-UK and UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre. He has 30 years’ experience working principally on international policy processes, with much in-country work in Southern Africa, Southern Asia and the Caribbean. Previously, Steve was Chief Environment Adviser at DFID, IUCN Project Manager for Southern Africa, and Warren Weaver Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation. He has degrees from Oxford and Manchester Universities in Forestry, Agricultural Sciences and Landscape Planning, and has published several books and over 100 papers on sustainable development, environmental mainstreaming, forest management and certification.

 

Tom Bigg is Head of the Partnerships Team at IIED. His responsibilities include liaison with IIED’s main institutional funders and the development of a clear organisational strategy and plan of action. These issues are decided and led by IIED’s Strategy Team (ST), and Tom’s role is to support the effective functioning of the ST and timely decisions on institutional priorities and allocation of funding within the organisation. Tom works closely with the Director in developing a strong external profile for IIED: at present we have a significant focus on the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil in June 2012. Tom has worked for IIED since early 2001. Prior to this he worked for the UN Association UK, focusing on follow up to the 1992 UN Rio Summit. He completed a PhD in International Relations at City University in 2000.

 

Alastair Bradstock is IIED’s Business Development Director, and leads on our Monitoring & Evaluation work at IIED. He is part of the partnership team, which coordinates most funding bids,  helps colleagues improve proposals before they are submitted to donors and helps researchers target funders who might support their programmes. Alastair supports researchers with developing their M&E systems prior to submitting proposals and during implementation. Before joining IIED, Alastair was the Policy and Research Director at FARM-Africa for three years, and before that, he spent four years living and working in South Africa researching how the government’s land reform programme was affecting the livelihoods of beneficiary households.

 

Liz Carlile is Director of Communications and has been part of the leadership team for the six years that she has been at IIED. She has consolidated and developed the communications team and encouraged an emphasis on strong global media work and good policy writing, resulting in high impact short briefings and review pieces. Liz has worked in the voluntary sector for over 30 years and her main areas of expertise are in development, environment, the wider voluntary sector and work with s mall and medium enterprises . Liz brings a wide range of strategic communications and marketing skills to her role having worked across the fields of information marketing, publishing , media work, photo-library management, branding, production, strategic communications marketing and research communications and policy influence. As a consultant , she has also supported a number of organisations, such as the Institute of Development Studies, Friends of the Earth, World Bank, the ESPA initiative and the UN Poverty Environment Initiative in developing their strategic communications work. She has also been a communications reviewer for a number of evaluations of the DFID Research Consortia and is a regular member of the Economic and Social Research Council Commissioning Panel. Liz has a post graduate qualification from the Chartered Institute of Marketing in Strategic Marketing Communications and is also a trained Business Performance Mentor and Life Coach.

 

Barry Dalal-Clayton is a Senior Fellow at IIED where he has worked since 1988. Barry’s work at IIED has involved directing research programmes; advising governments, donors and international organisations; working with the private sector, and co-ordinating training and capacity-building work. He is currently leading IIED’s work on environmental mainstreaming and is a world-renowned specialist on strategic environmental assessment (SEA) – one of the key environmental mainstreaming tools. Since 2004, he has acted as technical secretariat to the OECD DAC SEA Task Team.

At IIED, Barry’s main areas of interest have included impact assessment, integrated and strategic environmental assessment and the development of sustainable development strategies; he co-authored a seminal OECD/UNDP sourcebook on developing such strategies with Steven Bass. He has acted as an e nvironmental advisor and consultant to numerous development cooperation agencies, development banks, UN organisations and the private sector and written several books and published over 100 papers and reports. In his earlier career he helped establish one of the world’s first community-based wildlife management programmes in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia and acted as environment advisor to Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda from 1983-85.

 

Nick Greenwood has been Head of Human Resources (HR) at IIED for 10 years, during which time the organisation has grown from 60 to 100 staff. He is responsible for all operational and strategic aspects of HR, including recruitment and resourcing, employee development and performance, employee relations (including the relationship with the union), and reward (monetary and non-monetary benefits). Future projects include working on organisational culture (including promoting a more commending culture), tackling under-performance, developing leadership, and tackling concerns about work-related stress.

Before joining IIED Nick was Head of Human Resources for a new media recruitment solutions company for two years and prior to that he was Head of Economics and Head of Sixth Form in the state comprehensive education system from 1987 – 2000. He has a first degree in Economics, a Post Graduate Certificate in Education and a Masters in Human Resource Management.

 

James Mayers works on forestry and natural resource governance issues – through research, capacity- building and advocacy. As Head of the Natural Resources Group he oversees some twenty-four staff and an annual budget of about £7 million. He manages various collaborations with partners in multi-country initiatives, including the Forest Governance Learning Group. This kind of work has taken him to a wide range of countries – primarily in Africa and South Asia. He is the lead author of several books - including Policy That Works for Forests and People and Company-Community Forestry Partnerships – and co-author of the Sustainable Forestry Handbook and Plantations, privatisation, poverty and power. He has taught forest policy in courses around the world, and is an experienced public speaker in forest and environmental policy forums. Outside IIED he is c o-Leader of The Forests Dialogue – an international organisation dedicated to dialoguing on fracture lines in forestry.

 

Diana Mitlin is an economist and social development specialist. She has worked in the Human Settlements Group since 1990, with a primary focus on urban poverty and urban poverty reduction strategies. Her work has included learning from and supporting the initiatives of a range of civil society organizations, including NGOs in the global North and South. Diana’s major focus has been on issues related to secure tenure, basic services and housing, and financial services for residents, including savings, loans and government subsidies. From the early 1990s, she has worked closely with networks and federations of the urban poor and associated NGOs, particularly the network Shack/ Slum Dwellers International. This work has included action-research and operational development initiatives to influence the policies and programmes of local and national governments and international development agencies, seeking to ensure that there is more support for citizen-led development. Diana holds a PhD in social policy from the London School of Economics.

 

David Satterthwaite is a Senior Fellow at IIED and editor of the international journal Environment and Urbanization. A development planner by training with a doctorate from the London School of Economics, he has also been working with the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change since 1998 and is a visiting Professor at the Development Planning Unit, University College London. He was awarded the Volvo Environment Prize in 2004 and is an honorary Professor at the University of Hull.

He has been working at IIED since 1974 and with the Human Settlements Group since 1977. Most of his work has been on poverty reduction in urban areas in Africa, Asia and Latin America, undertaken with local teams. He has written and edited various books on urban issues, including Squatter Citizen (with Jorge E. Hardoy), The Earthscan Reader on Sustainable Cities, Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World (with Jorge E. Hardoy and Diana Mitlin), Empowering Squatter Citizen; Local Government, Civil Society and Urban Poverty Reduction (with Diana Mitlin) and Adapting Cities to Climate Change (with Jane Bicknell and David Dodman) which are published by Earthscan, London. He is co-author (with Diana Mitlin) of a book on Urban Poverty in the Global South: Scale and Nature to be published by Routledge in late 2012.

 

Cecilia Tacoli has jointly headed up the Human Settlements Group with Diana Mitlin since March 2011. The shared position allows them to both pursue research interests while ensuring that the g roup fully participates in IIED’s strategic and management areas. Cecilia has worked in the Human Settlements Group at IIED since 1996, when she set up a collaborative research programme on rural-urban linkages. With partners in Africa, Asia and Latin America the group has explored and described the multiple inter-relations between rural and urban areas, enterprises and people, including the role of small towns in rural development, how processes of urbanis ation affect poverty and gender dynamics, how food markets can benefit poor urban consumers and smallholder rural producers, and the links between migration, mobility and climate change. She holds a PhD in Geography from the London School of Economics. 

 

Camilla Toulmin has been the Director of IIED since 2004 and has focused on developing the Institute’s strategy and communications. Under her leadership IIED has grown from £5 million turnover per year in 2005 to more than £20 million in 2010-11. IIED’s new strategy for 2009-14 focuses on four principal goals that bring together the institute’s diverse areas of work on climate change, human settlements, natural resources, and sustainable markets.

An economist by training, Camilla has worked mainly in Africa combining field research, policy analysis and advocacy to understand  how environmental, economic and political change impact on people’s lives, and how policy reform can bring real change on the ground. She has worked with people at many different levels from farmers and researchers, to national governments, NGOs, donor agencies and international bodies. Camilla studied Economics at Cambridge and London, before gaining her doctorate in Economics at Oxford. She is fluent in English and French. She is trustee of ICARDA (Syria), the Franco-British Council and a number of other boards. Her latest book is Climate change in Africa (Zed Books, 2009).

 

Chris Wilde is IIED’s Chief Operating Officer. His responsibilities include oversight of the financial systems and processes of the organisation, including statutory and donor reporting and compliance, management accounting and risk management. Chris reports to IIED’s Board on financial management and sits on the Strategy Team, contributing on financial issues. Chris convenes IIED’s Management Team which supports the Director in ensuring that IIED’s internal systems, policies and procedures are aligned with, and facilitate the delivery of, the Strategy, and also works closely with the other Core Service Heads in delivering core services to the organisation. He recently worked on developing IIED’s Business Plan which is to be rolled out in 2012-14. Chris has worked for IIED since early 2010, prior to which he worked for the International Rescue Committee-UK as Finance Director and WWF-UK as Senior Programmes Accountant. Chris is a Chartered Accountant and holds a PhD in Geography from London University.