I have been interested in global developments since an early age. How can we live in harmony, despite all our differences? Why do so many people believe this to be an impossible dream? After an abandoned study in physics, I shifted to history (which includes the history of physics in any case) at Groningen university in the North of the Netherlands. Given my focus on contemporary history I managed to get a job at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where I gradually moved through the ranks to the position of Director of the Evaluation Department of the Ministry. In 2004 I was appointed the Evaluation Director of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) at the World Bank. I served for 2 terms until 2014, when I retired from the Bank. As President of the International Development Evaluation Association (2014-2020) I co-organised three international evaluation conferences and co-edited the three books emerging out of these. As Visiting Professor at King’s College London, I prepared and taught a master’s module on evaluation of sustainable development. On ethics for evaluation, I worked at the Institute for Development Studies in Brighton, where I became an honorary associate. From 2017-2023 I served as a member of the Advisory Council of Wilton Park in the UK. The list of my publications can be found here.
As an advisor and applied scientist, I have worked since 2014 for many international and national organisations; amongst them the World Bank, UNDP, the OECD, IFAD, FAO, the Green Climate Fund, the ADB, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Swedish EBA. Special mention should be made of my support for and involvement in the Climate Investment Funds, first as advisor for the Evaluation & Learning Initiative, and later for the Transformational Change Learning Partnership, from 2016-2023.
The Global West is my birthplace, where I have worked most of my life, and in which culture and societies I have participated. I fully recognize the historical responsibility of the West for what it has done in and to the world since 1492. Exploitative trade was the reason why the West started conquering the world, beginning in what would become Latin America. The most horrendous example was the trade in the enslaved, which mainly focused on Africa. When the trade stopped, it took several decennia more to stop slavery. When that finally happened, full reparations were offered – to the former owners of slaves. Hardly any efforts were made to compensate the former slaves for what they had gone through. The Global West also bears responsibility for the Industrial Revolution and its follow-up, which brought wealth and power to many, but also left many behind and locked us in on the road towards overuse of the resources of the Earth. More and more this is now weighing on my consciousness and is reflected in my writing.
