Meet Siad
Siad Darwish is an environmental anthropologist who leverages systems thinking and participatory design to create inclusive, transformative solutions for climate action, specifically in fragile settings and complex crises. His ability to bridge research, training, policy, and practice, combined with a focus on equity and sustainability, enables him to catalyze impactful change in some of the world’s most challenging contexts.
Siad has been working with CDA since 2008, when he was trained on CDA’s Reflecting on Peace Practice. For the past several years, working with some of the foremost humanitarian and development organizations, as well as their local partners, Siad has led CDA’s global collaborative research project on climate change and systemic risk.
With CDA and as an independent consultant, Siad has worked with a wide range of multilateral agencies, international organizations, development banks, governments, and private sector clients. However, Siad does not deliver prescriptive advice. Instead, he approaches all his assignments with curiosity, humility, and open listening in order to design participatory processes in which he can learn together with his clients and affected communities to achieve the best possible outcomes for those most affected. In this way, Siad has, for example, developed Oxfam’s policy on gender, climate change, and conflict, and the International Rescue Committee’s policy on programming in fragile and climate affected contexts. Previously, Siad co-developed USAID’s approach to food security in fragile and conflict affects environments.
His publications include articles on the importance of complexity informed programming in the Anthropocene, the intersection between Disaster Risk Reduction and Peacebuilding, environmental governance in authoritarian contexts, and guidance notes on integrating masculinities into peacebuilding programs.
Siad also designs and facilitates training interventions that address the most pressing needs of humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding organizations, and guides organizational change processes to integrate learning. He has trained over a thousand people in conflict sensitivity for UNDP and teaches at the Academy for Conflict Transformation.
As an applied academic, Siad works as a Research Associate at the University of Melbourne’s Initiative for Peacebuilding, and he has taught at the University of Wollongong and contributed to research projects at Deakin University in Australia.
Siad holds a PhD in Critical Interventions in Theory and Ethnography from Rutgers University, an MA in the Anthropology of Development from the University of Sussex, and a combined honours BSc in biology and anthropology from the University of Surrey.
