Adrian ATKINSON

Dr. Adrian Atkinson has practiced freelance consultancy with international agencies through national and local governments to NGOs and CBOs since the early 1970s. He has also maintained academic positions from the late 1970s and is currently Professor in ‘Planning in the International Context’ at the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning of the Technical University Berlin. From 1983 to 1997 he was lecturer and senior lecturer at the Development Planning Unit 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 and Somalia. 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.

Further on the subject of Local Economic Development, Dr Atkinson has worked with the ILO with a focus on the Informal Economy. Work here included the drafting of the International Labour Conference 2002 discussion paper on the Informal Economy and the production of a Course Guide for Local Authorities on the informal economy that has been versioned in a number of Asian and countries and in Latin America. He has also developed teaching material on LED, contributing to a course on this subject taught at the University de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, to staff of provincial authorities and the national government on LED.

His work on environmental issues has taken various forms. Most recently he produced a background paper on natural resources available to the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) for development for the UNCTAD biannual report on the LDCs. He also produced an Environmental Strategy and Action Plan for South-eastern European countries for the Stability Pact and generated project documents for a number of environmental projects for the Hungarian Government to be funded under the PHARE programme. He was also contracted by UNRISD to produce a paper on urban environmental planning and management for the Geneva Social Summit 2000.

However, Dr Atkinson’s environmental work has focused mainly on urban environmental planning and management – and this was the focus of the above-mentioned EC project in Vietnam. In the 1990s and beginning of this century, Dr Atkinson worked closely with the GTZ and EC in developing their policies on urban environmental management. This 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 documents for the GTZ and for the eighth Thai National Social and Economic Development Plan. Dr Atkinson has also published extensively on these issues, drafting the main chapter of the DPU publication Sustainable Urbanisation: Bridging the Green and Brown Agendas produced with DFID funding for the Sustainable Development Summit in Johannesburg in 2002.

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