David Jackson is a Non-Resident Fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC). He is recognized as a thought leader in local government finance with over 30 years of experience as an economist and urbanist.
He began his career as an urban planner in London during the 1980s and later founded a consulting company focused on policy development and financing local infrastructure in over 10 African and Asian countries. In the 1990s, he assisted Mozambique’s Ministry of Planning and Finance in designing a national system for local government finance, which was subsequently adopted and scaled up by the government and development finance institutions.
In 2006, he became a Decentralization Advisor to the Government of Indonesia and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), where he developed the Aceh Government Transformation Programme, credited as vital to the recovery after the civil war and the Indian Ocean Tsunami.
By 2009, he was Head of the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) Asia and Pacific office, where he supervised support to governments in the region and created the Local Climate Adaptive Living Facility, which enabled multiple countries to access climate finance for resilient investments, including direct access from the Green Climate Fund. This initiative gained recognition from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and established a global standard for local resilient finance.
From 2013 to 2024, he directed UNCDF’s Local Development Finance Practice at a global level, initiating the Malaga Coalition for municipal finance, the International Municipal Investment Fund (now managed by Meridiam), and innovating city guarantee facilities and local capital market reforms for local government bonds.
He holds a master’s degree in development planning from the University of East Anglia and a bachelor’s degree in geography from the London School of Economics. He has published extensively and is a member of the scientific committee of the OECD World Observatory of Subnational Finance and Investment, as well as a commissioner of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) Urban Finance Commission.