Joshua Lincoln

Joshua Lincoln (PhD) is currently a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Law and Governance (CILG) where he focuses on global governance, sustainability and the Net Zero transition. Drawing on twenty-five years of experience across four continents, he is a Principal at LICS and an advisor to heads of government and organizations. He sits on the board of directors of the Global Governance Forum, the advisory board of the Cambrian Futures Group, and is a member of the New Carbon Economy Consortium.

At CILG, Joshua is pursuing several research and writing projects on pluralism in multilateralism, global governance, sustainability and the Net Zero transition. He is co-investigator with Ian Johnstone of a project on the 2022-2025 intergovernmental negotiations for a global plastics treaty.  He is also researching the governance implications of the global decarbonization shift for a book project under a small grant from the Global Challenges Foundation and works more generally on multilateralism, geopolitics, and treaty-making in the context of the Net Zero transition.

His recent publications include “Carbon, Confusion and Conflict – Global Governance Implications of the Net-Zero Energy Transition,” in Global Governance and International Cooperation – Managing Global Catastrophic Risks in the 21st Century, Eds Richard Falk, Augusto Lopez-Claros (Routledge, 2024), ‘Abdu’l-Bahā ‘Abbās, A Life in Social and Regional Context (Idra, 2023); and “Global Governance in an Era of Pluralism,” Global Policy, Vol 13 no 4 (2022).  He also writes periodically for World Politics Review.

From 2013 to 2019 he served as Secretary-General of the Bahá’í International Community.  Based at the Bahá’í World Centre, he represented the international governing council of the Bahá’í community in its external affairs.  Between 2000 and 2013, he worked at the United Nations, including as Chief of Staff to the Director-General of the UN Office at Geneva and as Senior Officer in the Executive Office of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York.  He also worked in mediation and preventive diplomacy with the UN Cameroon-Nigeria Mixed Commission and in UN peacekeeping and peacemaking field missions in Ethiopia/Eritrea and North/South Sudan.  Earlier, as an academic/policy researcher, he worked for universities, think tanks and institutions including the World Bank.  He holds a BSFS from Georgetown University in International Politics, and both a MALD and a PhD in International Relations from Tufts University.  He speaks fluent French and basic Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish.