Team

Cross thematic group members:

• Mary McNeil, Coordinator
• María González de Asís, Senior Public Sector Specialist / Governance
• Víctor Vergara, Senior Public Sector Management Specialist
• Karen Sirker, Social Development Specialist
• Veronica Nyhan-Jones, Social Development Specialist, IFC
• Marcos Mendiburu, Social Development Specialist
• Andre Herzog, Senior Urban Specialist
• Marguerite Monnet, Consultant
• Damon Luciano, Program Assistant
• Drew Harton, Consultant  

Mary McNeil

Mary McNeil coordinates the Socially Sustainable Development thematic group, and Senior Operations Officer in the World Bank Institute's Sustainable Development Division (WBISD). She is also a team member of WBI's Urban Program.

Ms. McNeil has been with the World Bank Group since 1986. Before joining WBI in 1997, she was Public Affairs Specialist for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), where she coordinated the Corporation's relations with the NGO community. Prior to IFC, she worked in the World Bank's Vice Presidency for Sustainable Development, where she managed capacity building programs and provided operational support in the urban and water and sanitation sectors, working primarily in Africa and Eastern Europe. In 1992 she launched The Urban Age, a quarterly journal on urban affairs.

During 1993-94 she took a leave from the Bank to attend the John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she was the Joel Leff Fellow in Political Economy, focusing on community development, participation and urban development issues.

Before joining the Bank, she was a journalist covering environmental affairs for Congressional Quarterly, where she authored a book on environment and health. She has also worked as an editor/journalist for the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the National Academy of Sciences, and for several newspapers. Ms. McNeil has a Masters degree in Public Administration from Harvard University.

Maria González de Asis

Maria González de Asis is a Senior Public Sector Specialist at the World Bank Institute.

Employed by the World Bank since 1997, she worked for the LAC (Latin America and the Caribbean) region on Legal and Judicial reforms in Guatemala and Venezuela.

As member of the Governance team she is managing anticorruption programs and action-oriented learning activities, disseminating emerging best practice in governance, rule of law and anti-corruption worldwide at the national and municipal levels. In the field, she advises leaders, public officials, and civil society on institutional reforms strategies to improve governance in their countries.

Before joining the World Bank, she worked at Transparency International in Washington, Berlin and Peru, and for the Spanish Lawyer Firm “Abogados Asociados” dealing with political anticorruption cases. She has carried seminars and presentations at the Autonoma University of Madrid, Universidad de Educacion a Distancia, Georgetown, Harvard and Standford.

Her publications include: "International Corruption" (Claves 1999), "Judicial Reform and Corruption" (La Revista 1997) and "La Burocracia Española" (Revista de Derecho 1996), "Integridad Municipal para America Latina" (Cuaderno del Centro Latinoamericano de Capacitacion y Desarrollo de los Gobiernos Locales, IULA CELCDEL), "La corrupción Judicial" (Gestion y Análisis de Políticas Publicas 2001), "Reduciendo la Corrupcion a Nivel Local", "La construccion de coaliciones para combatir la corrupcion" (Gestion y Analisis de Politicas Publicas 2002).

She is a member of the Executive Board of CEJA (Centro de Estudios Juridicos para las Americas). Ms. González de Asis has a Master's degree in Law from the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, she has finished the Phd courses and is a current candidate for a Phd in Law and she has a Master's degree in Public Policy from Georgetown University.

Victor Vergara

Victor Vergara is subnational finance and administration specialist for the World Bank Institute Economic Policy and Poverty Reduction division (WBIEP) of the World Bank. Prior to joining the World Bank, Mr. Vergara was manager of assistance to disadvantaged coastal municipalities where he managed a multi-disciplinary team in designing, implementing and supervising infrastructure investment programs in the poorest regions of Mexico.

In the World Bank, he has worked with the Policy and Research Department where he assisted in the preparation of the Bank's Municipal Development Policy Paper.

He was recruited by the operational branch of the World Bank where he was responsible for the design and supervision of technical assistance programs on financial management and governance for subnational governments in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela.

He was the author of World Bank Policy Options Paper on sub-national reform for the Mexico (1994-2000) and a World Bank sector study Venezuela Better Urban Services: Finding the Right Incentives.

Mr. Vergara is currently with the Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations group of the Macroeconomic Management and Policy Division of the World Bank Institute (WBI).

Among Mr. Vergara's responsibilities include the management of regional municipal technical assistance initiatives in Latin America and Eastern and Southern Africa and co-task management of a WBI flagship course on Intergovernmental Fiscal relations and local Financial Management.

Mr. Vergara is a Mexican national and holds Master of Agriculture degree from Texas A&M University and a Master of City Planning (Regional Economics) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Karen Sirker

Karen Sirker is a social development specialist in the Water and Rural Program of the World Bank Institute's Sustainable Development Division. She currently works on anti-corruption, good governance and social accountability in the water sector and is a member of the Rural Water Supply and Small Towns Thematic Group. For the past three years, she has conducted global research on social accountability and has designed and implemented capacity development programs to operationalize social accountability approaches and tools into Bank projects in South Asia and Africa. She co-wrote a World Bank Institute Working Paper entitled, "Stocktaking of Social Accountability Initiatives in Asia and the Pacific."

Since joining WBI, she has been involved in:

• managing the traditional structures and local governance program;
• developing and implementing staff learning in participatory monitoring and evaluation;
• managing community-based monitoring and evaluation learning program in Nigeria;
• developing and coordinating training in economic management and development planning in 1999 and 2000 in East Timor.

Before coming to the World Bank, Ms. Sirker worked for the international non-profit organization, Search for Common Ground, in conflict resolution; with Human Rights Watch, and as a consultant to the United Nations Economic and Social Committee (ECOSOC) working on UN resolutions related to women in development, disarmament, human rights, and south-south cooperation.

Ms. Sirker holds an M.A. in International Economics and Social Change and Development from Johns Hopkins University (SAIS).

Veronica Nyhan Jones

Veronica Nyhan Jones is a Social Development Specialist with the World Bank Institute and the International Finance Corporation's Community Development Fund for Extractive Industry. In both roles, she focuses on improving the relationship between government, the private sector and civil society. This includes work on social capital, social accountability, conflict management, participatory methods, monitoring and evaluation, cross-sectoral partnership building, and community-driven development (CDD).

Since joining the Bank in 1998, she has been involved in:

• supporting private-public-civil society partnerships for local development related to oil, gas and mining projects;
• designing and delivering learning programs to scale up capacity for community development and improved local governance in Africa;
• facilitating social inclusion and policy participation for Roma in Eastern Europe;
• publishing learning and/or measurement tools related to empowerment, social capital, and social accountability;
• analyzing and implementing findings from the Voices of the Poor participatory research project which fed into the World Development Report on Attacking Poverty 2000/1; and
• coordinating the Bank's Social Capital Thematic Group( www.worldbank.org/poverty/scapital) .

Before joining the Bank, she worked on human and social development at the White House, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the International Youth Foundation and Fundacion Esquel in Ecuador. This has included projects on health care reform, crime and violence prevention, youth development, and corporate social responsibility.

Ms. Nyhan Jones has a Master's Degree in Public Policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology and African Studies from the University of Massachusetts.

Marcos Mendiburu

Marcos Mendiburu holds a Master’s degree in Public and International Affairs, with a major in Economic and Social Development from GSPIA,University of Pittsburg. He also pursued graduate studies in International Relations in Argentina, at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), where he worked for approximately five years.

Marcos joined the World Bank in 1999, managing and supporting several initiatives on access to information, transparency, and social accountability in different regions of the world such as ECA, LCR and EAP. In implementing the above activities, he forged partnerships with international institutions, local public bodies and NGOs.

On July 1, 2006, he joined the Media, Information & Governance Program of the World Bank Institute. Within the broader framework of promoting good governance, he has focused on promoting access to public information and strengthening the role that media plays in accountability and governance, mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean. Prior to this position, he was a member of WBI’s Social Empowerment and Social Inclusion Program.

Andre Herzog

André Herzog is an urban planner trained in U.K (MSc/University College London) and Brazil (BSc/University of São Paulo), with over 14 years of experience in and across Africa, Latin America, South East Asia, East Europe and Middle East.  Substantive areas of expertise: urban management, decentralization, and social accountability. Since September 2003, he was been working at the World Bank, leading and contributing to high level technical assistance, operational work, and policy guidance to national, regional, and local governments as well as civil society organizations and learning institutions.

He joined the WBISD Urban and Local Government Program on May 1, 2008. In his position as Senior Urban Specialist, André is responsible for leading and contributing to regional, country-wide, and/or city/local government specific capacity building initiatives in the areas of Urban Services to the Poor; Urban Planning and Management; Social Accountability and Demand Side Governance; and Disaster risk management. With special attention to Urban Services to the Poor, he is the task team leader for South Asia  urban capacity building program. Focused mainly in India  , the program aims to continue and scale up urban management certification, and support the urban country team to incorporate capacity development into the lending portfolio.

Before joining the Bank, he worked for the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), the InterAmerican Development Bank, and, and private sector in Brazil, coordinating technical assistance, capacity building, and research projects in Latin America, East Europe, Middle East, and East Asia.  His career initiated in France , later moved back to Brazil  where he founded his own urban planning firm (E+A), lectured at university, co-founded a new urban planning and architecture faculty (School of City ), and collaborated with different local governments, and non-governmental organizations.

Marguerite Monnet

Marguerite Monnet is a Human/social development specialist with extensive expertise in facilitation, capacity development and training.   
 
From January 2000 to December 2005, she joined the World Bank Headquarters as a Consultant and has been involved as training designer and resource person in work related to community driven development, accountability and service delivey, social accountability, conflict resolution, gender, reproductive health and poverty reduction.
 
Before joining the World Bank Institute, she has worked with the Government of Senegal as a civil servant, in private firms as a psychotherapist and then as human resources specialist.   As Free lance Consultant, s he has worked for many of the UN and bilateral agencies working as a facilitator and trainer, mainly on HIV/AIDS, training, management and gender issues.   
 
She is currently based in Dakar , Senegal , working as a Free lance Consultant. Her work includes Gender budgeting, mainstreaming Grassroots Management Training (GMT) in World Bank projects,and Management and leadership development facilitation for  FAO Senior managers .   
 
Marguerite Monnet has a Master 's Degree in Psychology  from the Univerity of Paris Sorbonne and certificates in Human resources development wit focus on capacity building and training (HEC Montreal and ESC-Lyon).