Adrian ATKINSON
Submitted by frankie on Fri, 2007-01-26 07:22.
Adrian Atkinson (2012)
Dr. Adrian Atkinson practices freelance consultancy with international agencies, national and local governments, NGOs and CBOs . He also maintained academic positions from the late 1970s to his appointment as Professor in ‘Planning in the International Context’ at the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning of the Technical University Berlin, a position that he held from 2003 to 2008. From 1983 to 1997 he was a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer at the Development Planning Unit (DPU) in London. As consultant and teacher/trainer he has worked in over forty countries.
Recently he has undertaken project formulation and evaluation work on projects and programmes in the field of urban development and urban environmental planning and management and in parallel developed policy in the field of Local Economic Development (LED). In the former case this includes work for the European Commission formulating urban development projects for Vietnam, Somalia and Georgia. He was Team Leader in the mid-term evaluation of the AsiaUrbs programme of the EC and also evaluated a number of projects in this programme. This work also took him to Jordan where he evaluated the GTZ contribution to the Wold Bank-funded Social Productivity Programme involving pilot projects in LED.
In 2000, in partnership with the environmentalist Margarita Pacheco, he established an NGO, New Synergies in Development as a ‘think tank’ that concentrated on local economic development, climate change and the way forward to an environmentally and socially sustainable economy (www.newsynergies.ch).
However, Dr Atkinson’s environmental work focuses mainly on urban environmental planning and management, which is the focus of his extensive work for the EC in Vietnam. In the 1990s and beginning of this century, Dr Atkinson worked closely with the GTZ and EC, on developing their policies on urban environmental management, which included ‘backstopping’ projects in Nepal, Thailand and Indonesia in which participatory methods of local environmental, planning were developed and for which he produced guidelines and teaching materials as well as policy document.