Dr Carl Wright is Secretary-General Emeritus, Commonwealth Local Government Forum, CLGF which he founded in 1995 and continues to serve on the CLGF Board, alongside senior elected mayors and national ministers of local government.
Dr Wright is a Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London and adviser, European Centre for Development Policy Management, Brussels. He sits on editorial boards of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the Commonwealth Round Table. In recent years he has served on the boards of the United Nations Association UK, Amnesty International, the Ramphal Institute, the University of Kent Business School and Canterbury City Council. He currently chairs the European Local Partnerships Working Group which is encouraging UK-EU twinning links.
Dr Wright has extensive experience at local, national and intergovernmental levels, including attending negotiations on sustainable development and climate 2012-16; he has worked with the UN and numerous UN Specialised Agencies such as UNDP, ILO and UN Habitat and other international organisations such as the EU and OECD. He has partnered with government development agencies in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Dr Wright was Assistant Director at the Commonwealth Secretariat 1988-94, coordinating technical programmes on Namibia/South Africa; he served as Commonwealth Election Observer in Ghana, Nigeria and Pakistan (twice) and on a range of Commonwealth and international expert groups. He was previously senior official at the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and first Director of the Commonwealth Trade Union Council 1974-88. In 1973 he was among the first UK nationals employed at the European Commission and has maintained close professional links with the EU throughout his career.
Since 2016, he has authored a number of in-depth research studies and published papers with a focus on implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and on Climate Action. He chaired the multi-stakeholder Canterbury Climate Action Partnership between 2019-2023 and led an official delegation at COP26 in Glasgow 2021 and COP27 in Sharm-el-Sheikh. He holds degrees from University College London, the Universities of Reading and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, Durban.
Dr Wright is author of Global Citizen: Grass Roots Activism and High Diplomacy (Hansib Publications, 2022). He and his wife Adele live near Canterbury, Kent and in London.