About Steve Waddell

Responding to Opportunity and Crisis

Responding to the 21st century’s enormous global challenges and realizing its unsurpassed opportunities require new ways of acting and organizing. NetworkingAction is my personal vehicle to support organizational, network, and societal change and development, through consultation, education, research, and personal leadership. In particular, I focus upon intersectoral (business-government-civil society) and inter-organizational collaboration to produce innovation, enhance impact, and build new capacity. These initiatives may be local, national and/or global. The topics are varied, including water, forestry, youth, finance, economic development, and peace.

I have done this for nearly 30 years, working with others as clients, funders, sponsors, and project partners. I am founding Executive Director of Global Action Network Net (GAN-Net) and Leadership for Change (an executive management program at Boston College); founder of the Strategy-Structure-Governance Community of Practice (SSGCoP); Steward with iScale; co-founder of The Change Alliance, Canada’s largest family of socially responsible mutual funds called Ethical Funds, and of the Global Finance Initiative (GFI).

Two key concepts are associated with my work: “societal learning and change,” which is a deep change strategy to address chronic and complex issues; and global action networks, which are an emerging form of global governance that addresses issues requiring deep change. After making a modest contribution to a report to the UN Secretary General on the future global governance choices, I coined the term “Global Action Network” as a specific organizational form.

I have dozens of publications, including the books Societal Learning and Change: Innovation with Multi-Stakeholder Strategies (2005) and Global Action Networks:  Creating our future together (2011). I have a Ph.D. in sociology and a Masters in Business Administration. A full CV is available here.

In a part-time capacity I am Senior Researcher at the Center for Research on Organization and Management (CROMA) at Bocconi University, a leading university in Milan;  and Communications and Community Development Steward with GOLDEN, a global network of research centers and corporations.  See the Roles and Areas of Expertise tabs for more information about what we might do together.

I am led by a belief in, and commitment to developing human capacity to work across differences to realize highest aspirations.