María Margarita “Paca” Zuleta is a Colombian lawyer with more than 30 years of experience in project development, 20 years in the private sector, 8 years in the Colombian government and almost 7 years in the Academia and as independent consultant. Zuleta acted as deputy Minister of Justice and was the head of the Presidential Anti-Corruption Program of Colombia. She wrote together with civil society organizations, the government and private sector an anti-corruption action plan, which was edited and published in 2005 which included the creation of a procurement agency. From 2005 and 2012, Zuleta acted as General Counsel of CI Prodeco S.A., a subsidiary of Glencore. In 2012, Zuleta was named the first head of Colombia Compra Eficiente, the public procurement agency created in 2011. In the Colombian public procurement agency, Zuleta led the transformation of the public purchasing system, designed and implemented several framework agreements, an e-procurement strategy, a training program for public buyers, and the open data strategy for information on the Colombian public procurement system taking advantage her private and public experience in procurement. In 2017, Zuleta joined the School of Government of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and in 2019 she became its dean where she does research on governance, public procurement, and corruption issues in addition of teaching politics and policy and policy implementation. Zuleta consultancy work is mainly with multilateral development agencies and includes evaluation of public procurement systems, training, development of action plans to intervene procurement systems from legal and policy framework to operations and training.

Dr. Pradeep Peiris is Head and Senior Lecturer of the Department of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Colombo, and Director and Treasurer of the Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo. He obtained his PhD in Political Science from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2014 under the NUFU/ NOMA fellowship scheme of the University of Oslo, Norway.

He is currently a Fellow in the research consortium “Reversing the Gaze: Towards Post-Comparative Area Studies, led by the Universities of Basel, Zurich and Edinburgh, with collaborators from Europa, Asia, Africa and North America. Dr. Peiris has most recently authored the book titled Catch-All Parties and Party-Voter Nexus in Sri Lanka (Palgrave Macmillan) and edited the book titled Is the Cure Worse than the Disease? Reflections on COVID Governance in Sri Lanka (Centre for Policy Alternatives).

He has also published on a wide array of subjects ranging from electoral politics to opinion polling, gender, liberal economy, and the democratic discourse in Sri Lanka. He is a leading survey researcher in Sri Lanka with over two decades of experience, and is the country representative of the ‘World Association for Public Opinion Research’ (WAPOR) and ‘Democracy Barometer’. His current teaching and research engagements focus on Political Theory, the Philosophy of Science, Quantitative Research, Democracy and Democratization, and Research in the Social Sciences.

Professor Faizel Ismail is the Director of the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town. He has a PhD in Politics from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom (2015); an MPhil in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex (1992), and BA and LLB Degrees from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (Pietermaritzburg) in South Africa (1981 and 1985).

Since July 2015 he has convened Post-Graduate and Masters level courses at UCT: on International Trade Law in the Faculty of Law; on International Trade Policy and Practice in the Graduate School of Business (GSB), and; on International Trade Negotiations and Global Governance in the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance.

He has served as the Ambassador Permanent Representative of South Africa to the WTO (2010-2014). He has served as the Ambassador Permanent Representative of South Africa to the WTO (2010-2014). He was the Chair of the WTO Committee on Trade and Development negotiating group (CTDSS) for two years (2004-2006), the Chair of the WTO Committee on Trade and Development (CTD) for one year (2006/7) and the Chair of the WTO Committee on Trade, Debt and Finance (WGTDF) for two years (2012-2014).

He was also South Africa’s Special Envoy on the South Africa-USA AGOA negotiations between January 2015 and June 2016. He led South Africa’s trade negotiations with SACU, SADC and the European Union since the beginning of the new democratic government in 1994.

He is currently serving a second term as Chair of the International Trade Administration Commission (ITAC) (2015 to 2023). The Secretary General of the AfCFTA appointed him as a convenor of the AfCFTA Trade and Industrial Development Advisory Council as from the 21^st of January 2022. He is an associate editor of the Journal of World Trade.

He is the author of three books on the WTO: Mainstreaming Development in the WTO. Developing Countries in the Doha Round (2007) and Reforming the World Trade Organization. Developing Countries in the Doha Round (2009). His latest book on the WTO was published by the South Centre and TIPS: WTO Reform and the crisis of multilateralism. A Developing Country Perspective (2020). He has also published a book on the African Continental Free Trade Area: The AfCFTA and Developmental Regionalism. A Handbook. TIPS. Pretoria. April 2021. He has published over 50 articles, chapters and working papers in international journals and books on trade and economic development issues.

David Karas is a French-Hungarian political economist working on developmental policies in emerging economies. He holds an MA in Comparative Politics from Sciences Po Paris, an MA in Nationalism Studies from CEU and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the EUI. He has taught international political economy and IR to undergraduate and postgraduate students at OSF’s CSLA Fellowship program, Manipal University in India, the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, ELTE University in Hungary and Webster University in Vienna.  At CEU DI, his postdoctoral research project examines how a pivot to Sub-Saharan Africa is reshaping the governance, normative content and power relations between public and private actors within the European Development Finance Architecture (EFAD). He is also the creator of Poliko Podcast which is a platform to showcase innovative empirical and theoretical research in political economy.