Jeb Brugmann

ICLEI USA Board President

ICLEI Founder and former Secretary General

Jeb Brugmann serves on ICLEI USA's Board of Directors as he continues a 25-year career in the municipal and urban sectors. For the last five years he has worked intensively in the private sector with major multinational corporations helping develop new products and business models to serve large low-income populations in developing countries.

In 1990, Brugmann founded the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) and served as ICLEI’s Secretary General from 1991-2000. In this capacity, he conceived and founded the worldwide ‘Local Agenda 21’ initiative, which since its high profile endorsement by 178 countries at the 1992 UN ‘Earth Summit’ has engaged nearly 10,000 communities in 115 countries in community-based sustainable development planning and implementation. In 1991, Brugmann and Philip Jessup also co-founded ICLEI’s Cities for Climate Protection Campaign, which has since involved more than 800 cities and towns in more than 50 countries in a coordinated effort to quantify and reduce their local greenhouse gas emissions.

Between 1985 and 2005, Brugmann worked directly with 49 municipalities and urban slum communities in 21 countries on their local sustainable development projects. From 2000-2003 he was Principal of City-States urban strategies consulting, serving as a strategy consultant to the cities of Barcelona, Metro Vancouver, Honolulu, and Kitakyushu, and managing a multi-year capacity-building program for Asian municipal leaders through a partnership between the Asian Development Bank, Honolulu and the US-AID Asia Environmental Program.

In 2003, Brugmann joined Prof. CK Prahalad, the world’s leading global business strategist, as a Founding Partner of The Next Practice, a business consultancy specialized in developing businesses that serve the “base of pyramid” (very low income) households in India, S. Africa and other parts of the world. . Brugmann’s clients have included bp (formerly British Petroleum), Barclays, Nestles and Reuters.

Brugmann is an economist by profession. He holds a B.A. in economics with highest honors, specializing in regional economics, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Masters Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government. He has received a variety of international awards and recognitions for his work in the urban sustainability field. He has served on numerous international “best practice” awards panels and published in a number of scholarly journals including Harvard Business Review, Third World Development Review, Environmental Impact Assessment Review, and Local Environment . He is a founding and continuing editorial board member of Local Environment. His critically-acclaimed book, Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World, was released in 2009 by Bloomsbury Press (USA) and Penguin Books (Canada), as well as in China, India, Australia, Poland, Netherlands and elsewhere.