Nina L. Gardner

Nina L. Gardner is the director of Strategy International, a consulting firm she founded specializing in Corporate Social Responsibility, sustainability and climate change. She typically works with both the CSR and Investor Relations departments on global sustainability issues, public-private partnerships, improving internal ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) metrics and on outreach toward the Sustainable and Responsible investor community. Her main long term clients have included ENEL, Pfizer, STET, Aspen Institute Italia and the OECD (where she helped expand the global project on indicators for Measuring the Progress of Societies).

Prior to her work in CSR, she practiced law in Washington DC, with Jones, Day Reavis and Pogue and in Prague, with Squire, Sanders and Dempsey. She then joined the UN as a political officer in their Zagreb liaison office post operation Flash and Storm in 1996 and then with the OSCE focusing on institution building in Vukovar. Her varied professional experiences convinced her that the best way to effectuate change is to encourage the public, private sector and civil society to work together – and that business can turn human rights and environmental challenges into profitable opportunities.

Ms. Gardner is an activist in women’s issues – and is the founding president of three professional women’s associations in Europe (Prague, Paris, Rome) and was instrumental in getting the OECD women’s entrepreneurship MENA programme launched. She is on the advisory board of the Women’s Forum for the Economy in Society and the Harvard Coalition for Responsible Investment. She is a graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe, Columbia Law School and was a Rotary scholar at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotà, Colombia. Ms. Gardner is fluent in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, is a member of the New York Bar and the Council on Foreign Relations. She has been teaching Business and Human rights since 2010 at Washington College of Law at American University and at Johns Hopkins SAIS since 2013. She is a frequent moderator on issues relating to CSR, energy, water, climate change, women’s entrepreneurship, and responsible investing.