Broad Thematic Expertise: Facilitating effective strategic partnerships between citizens and government, including multi-stakeholder platforms & issue-based coalitions -- From serving as a Technical Field Adviser for a small Nigerian Conservation NGO in the 90s, to Technical Director of a £40m FCDO Social Accountability & Governance Programme to date, Steve has provided technical leadership in establishment and development of platforms for constructive dialogue to address pressing land-use conflict, social development and public service delivery issues.Specific Thematic Expertise: Understanding of the political ecology and economy of herder-farmer relations and pastoral inclusion / exclusion in Northern Nigeria -- From 1991 to 2001 Steve lived, worked and studied in farming and herding communities in remote rural areas of Plateau, Bauchi and Kaduna States, facilitating pastoral inclusion programmes as a volunteer and post-doctoral student. From 2001 to 2010 he served as lead technical advisor of DFID’s Joint Wetlands Livelihoods project, facilitating pastoral inclusion in multi-stakeholder driven, institutional reform processes for integrated land and water resources management and inter-communal land-use conflict management, at community, wetlands and basin level, across Kano, Jigawa, Bauchi, Yobe and Borno States.Broad Programmatic Expertise: Hands-on strategic direction, guidance and mentoring of national staff on technical programme management, including embedding IBP, PEA, TWP and flexible & adaptive programming approaches -- From 2010 to date, Steve has served as the technical lead/director on a succession of DFID/FCDO public sector accountability and governance programmes, providing supervision and professional development of Nigerian colleagues in technical and team leadership roles, building their capacity through ‘learning by doing’, ‘knowledge transfer’ and competency-based HR management processes.Specific Programmatic Expertise: Development, implementation and oversight of contextually informed and evidence-based, learning and adaptive management processes and systems (LAMPS) -- From 2016 to date, Steve has played a leading role in development of LAMPS for FCDO’s PERL programme, aligning technical, financial and operational systems with locally led, politically smart, adaptive ways of working, informed by reflective learning, political economy/contextual analysis, jointly overseeing the programme’s approach to M&E and VFM, including PERL’s outcome mapping and harvesting strategy and Most Significant Change (MSC) case study methodology.
