Driven by a passionate belief in the power of collaboration to achieve prosperous, inclusive and sustainable business and society, Darian has for the last 17 years worked extensively with companies, the United Nations, NGOs, and governments with one aim: to drive the use of robust, effective partnerships for sustainable development worldwide.

His pioneering work takes a multiple level approach: building individual capacity for partnering (including developing TPI’s flagship training course – the Certificate in Partnering Practice); the development of organisations’ institutional capability for partnering (through the Fit for Partnering action research programme); building standards in the brokering, support and evaluation of partnerships; and a systemic approach to drive innovative collaboration across the sectors through in-country ‘Business and Development Hubs’ being piloted in Colombia, Zambia and Mozambique.

Darian has written extensively on cross-sector partnership, lectures around the world and has played a significant role in driving the public-private cooperation agenda of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation as well as engaging with other international processes including Rio+20 and the SDGs. His white paper setting out a new country-level architecture and a Roadmap to systematically drive the engagement of business as a partner in development, was launched by UK Secretary of State, Justine Greening, in April 2014.

Darian has a somewhat unusual career path: following a physics degree at Oxford and a Ph.D. at London and Harvard, he became a quantum physicist, first as a NASA scientist and then as a Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Paris, before segueing into sustainable development and cross-sector partnerships.

In 2015, Darian appeared on the Annual Review of Social Partnerships, 2015 Honors’ List as a Thexis Leader, awarded for “inspiring the international community through their cross-sector research and practice”.