Ananda Millard

Senior Partner

About me

Ananda brings over 25 years of global experience as a researcher, evaluator, and advisor. She has led multi-national teams addressing a range of sustainability issues across some 70 countries. Her key focus is aligning environmental and social goals with organizational performance and value creation, facilitating collaboration across multilateral agencies, governments, civil society, and the private sector. Her current work centres on assessing the social and operational risks of nature-based solutions and finding ways to mitigate them; risk assessment and response in complex supply chains; and due diligence on the human-environmental nexus in relation to CSDDD.

• Education: International Studies and Economy (BA); Conflict Analysis (MA); Peace Studies, with a focus on international law and post-war reconstruction (PhD); Environmental Management, with a focus on climate change adaptation and agriculture (MSc)
• Methodologist specialising in data collection in complex and hard-to-reach contexts
• Combines a conflict-analysis background with environmental management to assess problems as a whole, seeing how social and environmental dynamics shape each other rather than treating them separately
• Languages: English and Spanish (native), Portuguese, French
  

Biography

Ananda's early career was in peace and security. She advised on post-war reconstruction, disarmament and the reintegration of ex-combatants, the socio-operational challenges of mine action interventions, armed violence and small arms, and international humanitarian law, often in fragile and conflict-affected settings. This work sharpened a capacity for rigorous evaluation in places where reliable evidence is hard to come by, and it remains the foundation of how she works today. Her focus has since moved toward sustainability concerns in the private sector, where she applies the same discipline.

She has developed approaches to test whether nature-based and carbon investments deliver real, systemic impact; to assess supply chain due diligence on the ground in producing countries rather than from a desk; to protect supply chains from environmental and social risks; and to examine the trust between partners that determines whether these efforts hold. Her central interest is the link between the environmental and the social, and how organizations can act on both without losing sight of performance. Her extensive experience with the SDGs and other co-benefits also gives her a sharp eye for the veracity of impact claims and the trade-offs that come with implementation. She works across qualitative and quantitative methods, with a consistent bias toward findings that are honest, usable, and able to inform what an organization does next. Her clients have included bilateral and multilateral agencies, governments, civil society organizations, and private-sector firms.