Consultant Team

Ana Palacio, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain

Ana Palacio’s long professional career, beyond her tenure in Spanish government as Minister of Foreign Affairs, has followed three main avenues: supranational and multilateral institutions, academia, and the business world. Her activities in these realms have been driven by continued interest in European integration, international relations with a strong institutional perspective, as well as the extensive field of the energy transition.

In the European arena, Ana Palacio has held key positions, including Chair of the Legal and Internal Market Committee and of the Citizens Rights, Justice and Home Affairs Committees of the European Parliament, and President of the Conference of Committee Chairs, the coordinating body responsible for the inter-institutional negotiation on the legislative agenda. She has served as EU coordinator for the strategic integrated corridors known as the Trans-European Transport Network. Additionally, she was a member of the advisory panel on judicial appointments provided for in Article 255 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

Ana Palacio’s internationalist vocation led her to hold the institutional position of Senior Vice-President and General Counsel of the World Bank Group, as well as Secretary-General of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Currently, she is a member of the Industry Advisory Committee of the International Energy Forum (IEF), the multilateral organization that brings together oil and gas producing and consuming countries.

Among the positions she has held in major foundations and think tanks, her tenure as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York stands out. She is also a member of the Board and the Strategy Committee of the Atlantic Council. She was the first non-American member of its Executive Committee.

Ana Palacio is a visiting professor at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a member of the Advisory Board of the Elcano Royal Institute, the Board of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Academic Council of the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies.

In the business sector, Ana Palacio currently serves as the Lead Independent Director and Chair of the Sustainability and Nomination Committee of ENAGÁS (the gas system operator) and is on the board of ECOENER. She is also a member of the International Advisory Board of OCP Group, a global leader in the fertilizer industry, and is on the External Advisory Committee of former US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz’s Energy Futures Initiative and on the Global Advisory Board of the Nuclear Scaling Initiative. She was a member of the Executive Committee of AREVA, the European nuclear leader, serving as Vice President for International Development until its recent restructuring. She was also a member of the International Advisory Board of Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, and member of the Board of Emissions Reduction Corp.

She is a regular speaker at international conferences and a contributor to different publications, including a monthly column for Project Syndicate, and a weekly column for El Mundo.

Among the honors she has been awarded, her distinction as a Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa, from Georgetown University stands out, as well the Justice O’Connor Award, for which she shares the honoree list with former US President Jimmy Carter and former South African President F.W. de Klerk.