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WWF Experts
Steve Cox
Vice President and Priority Leader Gulf of California
Education
- MPP - Public Policy, Harvard University
- BA - Latin American Economic Development, University of California at Berkeley
Areas of Expertise
- Strategic program planning
- NGO organizational development
- Economics and public policy for conservation
- Community economic development
"Our job is to influence people, policies and businesses that drive change. Rather than stand on the tracks as the locomotive comes down on us, we have to get on the train and influence the engineer."
About Steve Cox:
Steve has been challenging expectations and blazing his own trail all his life. He designed his own major at Berkeley - Latin American Economic Development - and has held senior positions with The Nature Conservancy, the World Resources Institute and the Ford Foundation. He has also worked with the World Bank, the United Nations, CARE, the Oscar Arias Foundation, and ran his own non-profit organization, Acceso, in Costa Rica. But today, after all the years in the field, he still draws inspiration from the favela-dwellers who lived across the fence from him when he was a teenager in Bahia, Brazil. "They innovated every day to be able to survive on a shoestring," he says admiringly.
What's the connection between poverty and conservation? Steve says they are inextricably connected. "The things we need to do to protect biological diversity are the same things we need to do in order to make the planet more livable for people." Today more and more people are talking about the links between human livelihoods and biological diversity � Steve has been working to forge those links for almost 30 years.
