Mr Stephen Browne Deputy Executive Director Director of Bureau of Policy and Programme International Trade Centre

Stephen Browne, a British national, joined ITC as its Deputy Executive Director in March 2006. Trained as an international economist at the Universities of Cambridge and Paris, Mr Browne began his career as a consultant in London with the Economist Intelligence Unit. In 1976, he joined the United Nations (UN), where he has spent the last 29 years.

He was employed first as a researcher at the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. He then spent 21 years with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with assignments at headquarters in New York and in the field. He was posted to Thailand, Somalia, Ukraine and Rwanda, where he was Assistant, Deputy and then UNDP Resident Representative and UN Resident Coordinator. He was the first UN Representative in Ukraine, heading an office that served the UN system as a whole. During his appointment in Rwanda, four years after the genocide, he was mainly concerned with organizing UN assistance in the post-conflict transition from a humanitarian to a development phase. At the time of his assignment, it was UNDP’s largest country office (160 people) in a country with 1,500 UN staff from various agencies. At headquarters in New York, he served in various capacities, including leader of the Management Development Group and the Information and Communication Technology for Development Group. He has been responsible for UNDP’s trade portfolio and for collaboration with ITC and UNCTAD. For his third stint at headquarters, he was in charge of economic and social policy, including trade and globalization issues. His last post was head of policy and programmes at the UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok. Mr Browne has published four books on aid and development (a fifth is in progress) and about 100 articles on development topics. He is a regular participant in international conferences on globalization and other issues.