06/12/2022 - Carsten Staur, currently Denmark’s Permanent Representative and Ambassador to the OECD and UNESCO, was today appointed as the new Chair of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the leading international forum for bilateral providers of development aid.
Mr Staur, who also served as a State Secretary for International Development Co-operation, will take up his new position in early 2023. He takes over from Susanna Moorehead, a British national who has served as Chair of the DAC since early 2019.
“Carsten Staur brings a wealth of experience in international development to the DAC at a time of multiple, overlapping global crises,” OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said. “His decades of service within the intergovernmental, multilateral system will serve the Committee extremely well as it supports developing countries in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals.”
Mr Staur has been Denmark’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the OECD in Paris since September 2018, prior to which he was Denmark’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva (2013-2018) and in New York (2007-2013).
Over a long career in development and international diplomacy since joining Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1981, Mr Staur has worked as the country’s Director for Development Policy and Planning, as its Ambassador to Israel, as Under Secretary for Administrative Affairs, as Under Secretary for Bilateral Development Co-operation, and, from 2001 to 2007, as State Secretary for International Development Co-operation (Danida).
In recent years he has chaired the Boards of UNDP, UNFPA, and UNOPS, the drafting Committee of the 32nd International Red Cross and Red Crescent Conference and UNHCR’s Executive Committee. He has also twice served as member of the Board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) and as member of the Bureau of the Council of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Mr Staur holds a degree in History and Literature from the University of Copenhagen and is the author of the book “Shared Responsibility. The United Nations in the Age of Globalization” (2013), McGill-Queens’s University Press, as well as numerous articles on international co-operation and development.
The 31-member DAC is a forum for donor countries to agree on international principles, rules and standards for development co-operation. The DAC also publishes regular data and analysis on Official Development Assistance (ODA) flows and monitors how members deliver on their commitments via Peer Reviews. The OECD’s Development Co-operation Directorate serves as the DAC’s Secretariat. (See more at the DAC website.)
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