Ian Quick

Ian D. Quick is a management consultant with over 20 years of experience across multilateral institutions and in highly fragile contexts. 

He is currently completing late-career doctoral research on comparative approaches in the “climate, peace and security” field, i.e. how keystone institutions are conceptualising and addressing links between climate change and armed conflict.

Ian has coordinated global strategic reviews on topics including strategic assessment processes for the UN and World Bank systems; “stabilisation” in major protracted crises; and partnering for the development-humanitarian-peacebuilding “triple nexus”. Past institutional affiliations include a broad cross-section of the UN system (UNICEF; UNDP; UN Missions in the DR Congo and Central African Republic; UN Secretariat); the Australian government; the World Bank; and transnational NGOs.  

Previous publications include an oral history podcast on the ethics of international public service (onestepforward.fm); a monograph on multilateral peacebuilding in the DR Congo; and a series of articles on institutional learning within multilateral institutions. 

His doctoral research is anchored in empirical “life histories” of policy approaches to climate, peace and security. This entails close observation of how a range of institutions have developed actionable problem narratives, and arrived at specific solution sets, within a policy domain that is defined by its inter-scalar, cross-sectoral and multi-jurisdictional dynamics. From this standpoint it makes a significant methodological contribution to the study of a class of policy problem, and policy responses, that is increasingly consequential in the age of the “polycrisis”. 

• Climate adaptation
• International security
• Policy ethnography
• Political ecology

• Personal website
• Podcast