Kishan Khoday
Kishan Khoday is with the United Nations Development Programme where he serves as Regional Team Leader for Climate Change, DRR and Resilience in the Arab Region. Kishan holds a Juris Doctor in Law, specializing in multilateral environmental agreements and natural resource governance. Kishan has been with the United Nations since 1995, having served in China, India, Indonesia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This includes the past sixteen years with UNDP in management and policy leadership roles, including a special focus on the role of law in achieving sustainable development goals in the South.
He began his UN career in 1995 in India, support one of the lead authors of the Rio Earth Summit’s Agenda 21 on the local implementation agenda in remote Himalayan communities on issues of local governance, social exclusion and climate change. In 1997 he then joined UNDP, serving from 1997 to 2005 as UNDP Governance Advisor and Deputy Coordinator for Environment and Natural Resources in Indonesia, supporting legal reform cooperation after Indonesia’s historic revolution, including citizen access to information, participation and remedy at national and local levels, and a special focus on governance reforms for more equitable use of natural resources by indigenous communities in the restive Papua region in Indonesia’s east.
From 2005 to 2009 Kishan led UNDP efforts in China as UNDP Assistant Country Director, leading $300million of national initiatives to implement multilateral agreements on climate change, biodiversity and ozone protection, including a special series of strategic initiatives on local environmental and natural resource governance in the resource-rich less-developed areas of Tibet and Xinjiang. He then served as UNDP Deputy Representative in Saudi Arabia from 2009 to 2013, leading an expansion of climate change and energy cooperation, engagement of the Kingdom as a global partner to the post-2015 agenda, and launch of the UN’s first human rights activities in the Kingdom.
Since 2013, Kishan has served as UNDP Regional Team Leader in the historic transitions being faced in the Arab region. This includes cooperation on climate change and drought risk, sustainable energy, and the role of law and governance reform in creating a more inclusive and sustainable model of development. He also serves as UNDP focal point in the Arab region for use of Social and Environmental Standards and Stakeholder Grievance Mechanisms within UNDP cooperation.
Before joining the UN, Kishan worked with various civil society groups on issues of social and environmental justice in Canada and India. He is a current Member of the International Law Association Commission on Natural Resources and Development, has been a Fellow on sustainable development and the law at McGill University and Tsinghua University, an active participant in the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law, and has been active in the Asian, European and Indian Societies of International Law. He has over thirty publications on the role of law for achieving sustainable development goals in the South.