A seasoned serial entrepreneur, Jari Ala-Ruona co-chairs Oxygen 2050, a community of transformative entrepreneurs and investors dedicated to a brighter world. His journey exemplifies the relationship between personal growth and business, showcasing entrepreneurship as a way of being in the world. He pioneers digital financial inclusion in Africa, fostering global connections. Involved in the first IPSP cycle, he serves as a catalyst for positive change, dedicated to championing a future that is equitable and sustainable.

Full professor at the Department of Political Science of the University of São Paulo, Marta Arretche served as director of the Center for Metropolitan Studies (2009-2020), as the editor-in-chief of the Brazilian Political Science Review (2013-2019) and as vice-provost for research at the University of São Paulo (2016-2018). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Her field of interest is comparative and institutional analysis. Her areas of research focus on inequality, federalism, and social policies.

Professor of practical philosophy, Gustaf Arrhenius is interested in issues in the intersection between moral and political philosophy and the medical and social sciences (e.g. economics, law, and political science). He is best known for his research on our moral and political obligations to future generations and on issues in democratic theory. He is an honorary professor at Aarhus Univer-sity,a member of the Economics–Philosophy initiative at Paris School of Economics and a member of Academia Europaea. He was a member of the first IPSP Steering Committee.

Previously a senior advisor to the OECD Secretary-General and the Head of the Inclusive Growth Initiative, where she developed the OECD Framework for Action on Inclusive Growth and launched Business for Inclusive Growth, Romina Boarini heads the WISE. Before joining the Office of the Secretary-General, Romina Boarini worked for the Statistics Directorate and was responsible for OECD Better Life Initia-tive. Currently, she promotes the OECD’s position as a leading international institution and contributes to strengthening OECD research and advice on the ‘Beyond GDP Agenda’. Before joining the OECD in 2005, she was a postdoctoral fellow in sustainable development (chaire EDF-École Poly-technique) and worked as a consultant to the French Ministry of Social Affairs

Member of Centre for Sociological Studies (CIES) at the University Institute in Lisbon and associate researcher at Centre d'analyse et d'interventions sociologiques (CADIS) in Paris, Gustavo Cardoso was a visiting professor at IN3 in Barcelona and a member of the Innovation Lab of the Annen-berg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. He works in the field of communication and information studies. He is coordinator of the MediaLab-ISCTE and the European Journalism Observatory. He was a consultant at the Civil House of the President of the Republic Jorge Sampaio (2006-2016). 

As lead author on communication for IPSP, he organized the first IPSP final authors’ meeting in Lisbon in 2017

Lars-Erik Cederman’s main research interests include nationalism, state formation and conflict processes. Since 2003, he has been collecting evidence on ethnic groups and their participation in conflict processes. This immense data collection undertaking culminated in the widely used Ethnic Power Relations Dataset Family. New information and indicators are made accessible in a user-friendly manner via the GROWup - Geographical Research On War, Unified Plat-form. In 2018, he was also awarded a European Research Council advanced grant for a project on nationalist state transformation and conflict

Expert on topics related to citizen participation, civil society transparency, accountability, and good governance, Anabel Cruz has a long working experience with local, national, regional, and global civil society organization networks. She has been the chair of the board of CIVICUS in two different periods, and led the creation in 2009 of Rendir Cuentas, a Regional Civil Society Accountability Initiative in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is currently the civil society co-chair (2022-) of the Open Government Partnership (OGP). She founded the Institute for Communication and Develop-ment in Montevideo in 1989.

Leila Dagher is a Senior Fellow at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, a Research Fellow at the Economic Research Forum, and sits on the steering committee of the Mashreq Gender Facility.Her research applies to the areas of energy, environmental, and financial economics. She has been a visiting fellow at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Leila Dagher previously served as Economic Adviser to several public officials including a former Prime Minister. At LAU, she is tasked with setting up the new Center for Policy Analysis, an advanced think tank rallying internal and external experts

Purnamita Dasgupta’s research applies economics to real world contexts, is interdisciplinary and routinely involves stakeholder engagements and field studies. She has taught environmental economics in India and at Johns Hopkins University.  She has been a Coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for the International Panel on Social Progress and is currently, for the Nexus Assessment of the IPBES. She has researched for India’s National Determined Contributions, on implementation and evaluation of adaptation and mitigation interventions in South Asia, and city-level biodiversity action plans.

Fatima Denton is a senior leader in the UN system with depth of expertise in natural resource management in the African region. Prior to joining UNU-INRA in 2018, she worked with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Ethiopia (2012-2018). Before that, she worked with the Canada-based International Development Research Centre (IDRC). She is a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She has served on the inde-pendent scientific committee of the Climate Change and Food Security Programme, and is a current member of the advisory board of Future Earth.

Professor of public policy at the Torcuato di Tella University, Gala Diaz Langou has been working with CIPPEC in Buenos Aires since 2006 where she led the Social Protection team (2016-2021). She has also worked as an international consultant for several United Nations agencies and other international organizations and governments of the Latin American Region. Her work is focused on doing applied research on gender and children’s rights. She was selected as one of the 500 most influential people in Latin America and she was invited to the Group of 100 Women Leaders. She is a Delegate to W20 representing Argentina.

Aidan Eyakuze heads a leading regional civil society organiza-tion that works to enable children to learn, citizens to exercise agency and governments to be more open and responsive in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. Before joining Twaweza in 2015, he was associate regional director of the Society for International Development based in Tanzania. In 2016, he was appointed to the global steering committee of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and to the board of directors in 2023. He also serves on the board of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. He is a United World Colleges alumnus, an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership fellow and a member of the Aspen Global Leader-ship Network.

Fernndo Filgueira’s research centers on social structure, social policy and welfare regimes in Latin America. He has been a central player in multilateral institutions since his proposal of Basic Universalism (Inter-American Development Bank, 2006) as a blueprint for welfare reform in Latin America, advising governments and influencing the World Bank, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and specialized UN agencies. He was vice-minister of Education in Uruguay. He is a contributor to the T7/T20 recommendations group for the G7/G20. He received the Von Humboldt Award for his contributions to the social sciences in 2020.

Sakiko Fukuda-Parr’s teaching and research focus on decolonizing international affairs, global health, and global goal setting and governance by indicators. She has worked on the political economy of international development and the power of ideas and discourses in shifting policy approaches. From 1995 to 2004, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr was lead author and director of the UNDP Human Development Report. She currently serves as chair of the UN Committee on Develop-ment Policy, an expert committee of UN ECOSOC, and co-leads the Collective on the Political Determinants of Health.

Debra Furr-Holden is a professor of epidemiology and a public health leader with broad expertise in health disparities and policy-level interventions promoting health equity. She was previously the C.S. Mott Endowed professor of public health & associate dean for public health integration at Michigan State University. She was an assistant and later associate Professor at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she retains an adjunct professor appointment. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the White House Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineersh.

Ashoka fellow since 2011, Sascha Haselmayer is an author and social entrepreneur who has led urban innovation, economic development and government innovation projects in over fifty countries. He is a non-resident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former fellow at New America in 2020-2021. Among other ventures, he founded Citymart, pioneering innovation in city procurement in more than 100 cities in the world. He has advised organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Aspen Institute, the government of Chile, and the World Bank Groug.

Samia Huq is dean of the School of General as well as Research Fellow at the Center for Peace and Justice. She has been involved in research on the impact of secondary secular and madrasa education on gendered norms and practices, as part of the Initiative on Education, Gender and Growth in Asi. She is the chief academic officer representing Brac University at the Open Society University Network (OSUN), building bridges between various academic programs and universities and overseeing student and faculty mobilit.

She authored and was involved in the International Panel on Social Progress.

Lila Karbassi’s work supports the United Nations’ agenda to deliver a resilient net-zero future and drive business ambition towards the achievement of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. She is currently serving as the chair of the Science-based Target Initiative (SBTi), acting as a liaison between the SBTi and the UN Global Compact. She has been instrumental to the work of the UN Global Compact since 2005, and served - between 2017 and 2022 - as the chief of programmes. In 2016, Lila Karbassi was seconded to the Office of the UN Secretary-General supporting business engagement on the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Dina Kiwan is deputy director of Research and Knowledge Transfer at the University of Birmingham. She has an interdis-ciplinary background in psychology, sociology and education, educated at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and University College London. She was the Centre for Lebanese Studies fellow at the University of Oxford (2015-2016) and associate professor in sociology at the American University of Beirut (2012-2017). She leads the Global Challenges Research Fund Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ‘Disability Under Siege Network Plus’ programme (2020-2024) working with partners in Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine to address the chal-lenge that most children with disabilities never go to school.

She was a lead author in IPSP 1 on education.

Daniel Kostzer was senior Regional Wages specialist at the ILO Asia and the Pacific, and a former board member at the World Bank Group. His earlier positions include senior economic advisor at the UNDP Myanmar, head of the socio-economic unit at United Nations Mission (UNMIT) in Timor-Leste, Coordinator of the Social Development Cluster at the UNDP Argentina, director of Research and Macroeconomic Coordination at the Argentine ministry of Labor. He is a consultant on poverty reduction, income distribution and employment policies and was a member of the knowledge networks of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, ILO.

Will Kymlicka’s research focuses on democracy and diversity. He is co-director of a CIFAR program on Boundaries, Membership and Belonging, which explores whether we can redraw these boundaries in a more inclusive way without losing solidarity and the possibility of collective action. He is the co-director of the Multiculturalism Policy Index project, which monitors the evolution of multiculturalism policies across the Western democracies and contributes to the understanding of state-minority relations. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2023. He was a coordinating lead author in IPSP on Social Progress and Cultural Change.

Claire Meillier is a facilitator, process designer and researcher with expertise in delivering participative processes which put citizens at the heart of decision making. In 2020, in collaboration with other partners, she initiated and organized the first global Citizens' Assembly: the Global Assembly on the climate and ecological crisis for COP26, which received the backing from UN Secretary General, António Guterres. She was part of the facilita-tion team at Climate Assembly UK and Scotland’s Climate Assembly and one of the accredited researchers who observed Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat. She is knowledge and practice lead at Iswe Foundation.

Leticia Marino has worked for 35 years on forest and land use by indigenous communities in Mexico and Central America, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Since 2021, she chairs UNAM Coordination for Sustainability. She is author of 80 scientific articles and eight books on governance of natural resources, environmental justice, and social impacts of the environmental crisis. She was president of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (2013-2015), lead author for the Global Report of the International Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystems, and member of the Committee for Development Policies of the United Nations (2015-2021).

Doris Mwikali advocates for rapid and radical educational transformation to support sustainable and just societies. She is member of the SDG4 High-Level Steering Committee, the apex body for global coordination and monitoring of education systems that ensures the systematic alignment of approaches for education-related targets within the United Nations SDG structure. During the 2022 UN Transforming Education Summit, as part of the Transforming Education Summit Youth Advisory Group, she led the Youth Declaration process that was part of the UN Secretary-General's Common Agenda.

Living in Abuja, Nigeria, Charmaine Pereira works on the gender and sexual politics of violence, feminist thought and practice, and the politics of natural resource extraction in Africa. She has organised action research on sexual harass-ment and sexual violence in Nigerian universities with a view to strategising for change. She has been an active force in the coalition pushing for passage of the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act, 2015 in Nigeria and has coordinated research on implementation of the law.

Trained as a clinical psychologist, population/public health disparities researcher, and health behavior theorist. WIzdom Powell is a tenured professor of Psychiatry and a nationally recognized expert on psychological and social factors influen-cing the mental/physical health of African American men and boys. She has been a White House Fellow, a Ford Foundation Fellow, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellow, an Aspen Institute Health Innovator Fellow, and an awardee of the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation academic writing residency. She has been an Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) since 2018.

Camille Putois joined in 2020 the global CEO-led coalition of major companies coordinating with governments to advance inclusive growth. She provides overall leadership to B4IG’s program of work, which consists of concrete and measurable actions to fight against inequalities, sharing and promoting the most innovative and successful initiatives, and developing new forms of public-private financial solutions to support inclusive business models. She previously had a career in the French administration (deputy chief of staff to France’s prime minister, French Ministry of the Interior). She was also the founder of a GovTech startup, while simultaneously advising European tech companies on strategies and critical issues.

Marta Roig has over 25 years of experience conducting policy research and analysis related to inequality, social exclusion, international migration and their linkages to development. She currently leads the preparation of United Nations World Social Report of the Department for Economic and Social Affairs and that of other research productions on social issues. She is supporting consultations and coordinating technical input for a UN World Social Summit in 2025. Before joining the Division for Inclusive Social Development, Marta worked with the UN Population Division and at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Rana Sabbagh is co-founder of the award-winning Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), an OCCRP member. She joined OCCRP in 2020, working with Arab investigative journalists to produce high-quality, ambitious cross-border investigations in the largely autocratic and male-dominated region. She has dedicated her decades-long career as a journalist, columnist, and media trainer across the MENA region to promote free speech, human rights, gender equality, independent media, and the culture of ‘accountability journalism’. As the chief editor of The Jordan Times, she became the first Arab woman in the history of the Levant to run a daily political newspaper. He is the MENA region representative on the Board of Directors of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

Gonzalo Sozzo is the scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies  of the UNL. He is professor of civil and contract law of obligations in the Faculty of Juridical and Social Sciences. He is responsible for the chair ‘Consumers Rights’ and academic coordinator of the study ‘Specialization in law of Damages’ and ‘Specialization in environmental law, urban planning and supervision of cultural heritage’. Since 2010, his main research topics have been the history of  development models in Latin American constitutionalism;  regional environmental constitutionalism in Latin America; climate change litigation in the global south; private law  institutions in the Anthropocene era;  consumer law and ecological transition.

Laurence Tubiana chairs the French Development Agency and teaches at Sciences Po, Paris. Before joining the ECF, she was France’s Climate Change Ambassador and Special Repre-sentative for COP21, and an architect of the landmark Paris Agreement. Following COP21, she was appointed High Level Champion for climate action. She served as senior adviser on the Environment to a former French prime minister and chaired the French National Debate on the Energy Transition. She founded Solagral, an NGO working on food security and the global environment; the Institute of Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI); and the Directorate for Global Public Goods at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Co-founder of The GovLab, an action research center focused on transforming decision making using advances in science and technology, Stefaan Verhulst is also the co-founder and principal scientific advisor of The DataTank, a do-and-think tank that focuses on how to re-use data differently to serve the common good. He is a research professor at the Center for Urban Science and Progress at the Tandon School of Engineering of NYU; editor-in-chief of the open-access journal Data & Policy; research director of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance; and chairs the Data for Children Collaborative with Unicef.

Helena Wajnman works for República.org, a Brazilian non-profit organization that focuses on improving the quality of people management in the public sector. She holds a master of applied science in Data, Economics, and Development Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Bachelor’s degree in economics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Prior to joining República.org, she worked at Instituto Sonho Grande, where she helped design and scale a national public policy for extending school time. Helena Wajnman is a governance advisor at the Governance Innovation Initiative at MIT GOV/LAB and a member of the advisory committee of the Program Leaders that Transform at the Brazilian National School of Public Administration (ENAP).

Wing Thye Woo is also distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, senior visiting professor at Fudan University, and research professor at Sunway Univer-sity. Amongst his ongoing projects are  (i) ASEAN Green Future, involving 9 country teams analyzing the different ways to achieve net zero emissions of CO2; (ii) the Science Panel for Southeast Asia Biodiversity Protection, a coalition of universities, state agencies, NGOs and corporations to expand the rainforests, promote green agriculture, and raise the welfare of the indigenous communities; and (iii) the Middle-Income Trap project which aims at accelerating inclusive economic catching-up, i.e. SDG 8 (Decent work and economic growth), SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), and SDG 10 (Reduced inequality).

Bahru Zewde is founding fellow, vice-president of the Ethio-pian Academy of Sciences and fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. He was formerly chair of the Department of history and director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University and executive director of the Forum for Social Studies, a think tank based in Addis Ababa. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including ones from the British Academy, the Japan Foundation, the Institute of Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) in Berlin and from the Humboldt University.

Xiaobo Zhang's main research interests are development economics and Chinese economy. His research focuses specifically on agricultural economics, development economics, and the Chinese economy. He has rich field experience in developing countries, such as leading ambitious surveys like the Guizhou Household Panel Survey, or the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) survey (as co-PI), the Enterprise Survey for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China (ESIEC), Quarterly Online Survey on Micro-and-small Enterprises (OSOME) in China. He is the Chief Editor of China Economic Review. He was part of the Steering Committee of IPSP.

Over the past 25 years, Warren Feek has been heading a network of 90,000 people and organizations using media, communication, social change and behavior change strategies to address priority local, national and international development issues. That network has shared their work - 38,000 knowledge summaries - and engaged in review and dialogue for the purpose of helping to advance the scale, quality and impact of the work of other people in the network. He has a specific interest in understanding the strategic lessons from major social movements and the transformational possibilities of bold, at-scale policy initiatives.

Saleemul Huq is the Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and Professor at the Independent University Bangladesh (IUB) as well as Associate of the International Institute on Environment and Development (IIED) in the United Kingdom. In addition he is the Chair of the Expert Advisory Group for the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) and also Senior Adviser on Locally Led Adaptation with Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) headquartered in the Netherlands. He is an expert in adaptation to climate change in the most Vulnerable developing countries and has been a lead author of the third, fourth and fifth assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)