Volans Team: Alejandro Litovsky

Alejandro wants to be remembered for helping people and institutions imagine and create extraordinary possibilities to overcome barriers and work together for social change. He has worked around the world, mobilizing people in different sectors to rethink their modes and styles of cooperation to address development problems. In 2006 he led a global initiative funded by the Ford Foundation and organized activities and partnerships in Indonesia, Russia and Brazil, bringing together governments, businesses and NGOs, particularly around issues of energy and climate.

In his role as senior advisor to the collaborative governance programme at AccountAbility in London, he designed and led the first-ever multi-stakeholder dialogue on Energy and Accountability in Moscow, Russia, having brokered a partnership between Russian and international energy companies and Russian environmental NGOs. In 2007 he was the director for a high-level meeting to address energy poverty, bringing together former Presidents, Prime Ministers and international experts, in partnership with the Club of Madrid. Alejandro’s articles on improving energy security relations in the EU, energy poverty in the developing world, and reforming the global climate architecture, have been virally replicated by websites around the world.

Alejandro has worked extensively with global civil society leadership, having led and organized workshops at forums such as the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre (2005) and Civicus World Assembly in Glasgow (2006 and 2007). He also organized civil society workshops in Manila, Philippines; Eastern Cape, South Africa; Brazil and Argentina with local partners. He has regularly contributed to the debate on civil society leadership, and lately on the challenges to its positioning within the global climate advocacy agenda.

From 2000 to 2003 he worked throughout Latin America with the private foundation AVINA, managing social investment portfolios and supporting cooperation between social entrepreneurs and business leaders. He worked for Shell International’s future scenario team in London in 2004 and has since then been an advisor on strategic aspects of cross-sector collaboration, from the Swiss Agency for International Development (2008) to the World Bank Group and the Shell Foundation (2007), the Inter American Development Bank, and the British Overseas NGOs for Development in London (2005-2006).

In 2004 he was awarded the Hobhouse Memorial Prize by the London School of Economics (LSE), where he obtained his MSc in Political Sociology. In 1999 he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, where he obtained his BA in International Relations. In 2006 he gained professional accreditation as a partnership broker by the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London, UK.

Alejandro has a passion for music, from a long-standing affair with the piano and an amateur incursion into bossanova guitar, to organizing percussion jam sessions in parks. He performed as a professional hip-hop rapper for four years in the mid 90s and occasionally goes on stage for a live reprise.