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avatar for Ricardo Meléndez-Ortiz

Ricardo Meléndez-Ortiz

Geneva

Ricardo MELÉNDEZ-ORTIZ (@RMelendezOrtiz) is co-founder of ICTSD and has been its Chief Executive since 1996. Previously, he co-founded and was General Director of Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano (Quito). He has represented Colombia as a negotiator in several multilateral fora, including as permanent delegate of Colombia in Geneva and as a negotiator in GATT’s Uruguay Round, the Rio’92 UN Conference process, UNCTAD VIII, the Climate Change Convention, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Montreal Protocol. He acted as spokesperson for the G77 in several venues and served as chair of the UN Standing Committees on Commodities and on Trade Preferences. Earlier, he had served as Principal Adviser to the Colombian Minister of Economic Development and as Chief of Administration of the Office of the President of Colombia.

Since 1997, Mr. Meléndez-Ortiz has been the publisher of BRIDGES and its sister publications, and has edited, authored and published a wide range of books, articles and opinion pieces in English, French and Spanish on economic governance, trade, sustainable development and conflict management.

He has served or currently sits on advisory committees and the boards of a number of global policy initiatives, including as Member of the Board of Intellectual Property Watch (Geneva); the Operating Board of AccountAbility (London); the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Trade and Working Group on Trade and Climate Change; the Pardee Center Task Force on Governance for a Green Economy (Boston University); the Center for Global Development’s Global Trade Preference Working Group (Washington, DC); the Evian Group Brains Trust (IMD); the Global Governance Network of Globus et Locus (Milano); the Steering Committees of the UK Department for International Development’s Global Trade and Finance Architecture Initiative and of the UN DESA’s Sustainable Development Knowledge Partnership (New York); a Patron of the Earth Focus Foundation (Geneva); Chair of the Global Action Network’s Council (Cambridge, MA); and member of the UN Secretary General Millennium Project Task Force on Trade; the WTO’s Director General NGO Advisory Group; and the MOFCOM/IISD China Sustainable Development and Global Markets Task Force.

He holds Colombian and Belgian nationalities and is a resident of Switzerland where he lives with his wife and two daughters.