Matthias Jäger is the Lead Advisor Climate Change and Democracy, Global Programmes.

Matthias joined International in December 2022 as a national expert seconded by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), through GIZ. His role at the Institute is to lead the design of an institution-wide Climate Change and Democracy Initiative by coordinating the definition of a roadmap for its development and the implementation of its inception phase. This includes conceptualizing the new workstream as well as building the team to implement it. It also encompasses establishing partnerships for the initiative, with actors in the Climate Change and Democracy field such as practitioners, policymakers and academics, with emphasis on building bridges among the Democracy Assistance and the Climate Change communities.

Prior to joining the Institute, Matthias worked as a policy advisor at GIZ advising BMZ on all things governance, with a particular focus on governance assessments, international democracy promotion, the rule of law and liaising with International IDEA. In recent years, Matthias has set up a regional leadership programme on open government at the Organization of American States in Washington (OAS), developed a protection programme for whistleblowers and anti-corruption champions for Transparency International in Berlin, and advised senior management at the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw (ODIHR) on political, strategic and organizational matters as well as resource mobilization. He started his career at the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Gütersloh/Germany, where he worked on the Transformation Index (BTI) and coordinated the Transformation Thinkers network, an interregional and interdisciplinary dialogue on good governance and democratic change.

Matthias is part of the German civilian expert pool for peace operations in Berlin and has served as an international election observer for OSCE/ODIHR (in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Ukraine) as well as the OAS (in El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico). He is a UNAOC International Fellow, Member of the European-Arab Young Leaders Forum, and a Rotary Peace Fellow, among other distinctions, and has published widely on international affairs.