Juan Dumas is Co-Founder and Partner at MELIQUINA, a company that structures business partnerships where local communities are shareholders in renewable energy projects in emerging markets. Meliquina is currently developing utility-scale solar PV projects in Argentina and Colombia, advising companies, communities and banks on equity partnership models, and building the Community Equity Opportunity Fund, a blended-finance facility for communities to access capital and purchase meaningful equity positions in projects.

Juan brings to Meliquina twenty-four years of experience in negotiation, consensus-building. conflict prevention and resolution, and policy dialogue. He has worked extensively with development finance institutions (such as the World Bank Group, the Inter-American Development Bank or FMO) to prevent or resolve disputes connected to their investments projects. He played a key role in the UN team that brokered an agreement that ended violence and protests in Ecuador in late 2019 around energy subsidies. In the policy field, he has designed and conducted pioneering multi-stakeholder dialogue processes oriented towards fostering an energy transition in Latin America.

Earlier in his career, he also held leadership roles in Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano (Ecuador) and Fundación Cambio Democrático (Argentina), two civil society organizations devoted to promoting dialogue to address conflict and build public policy. During his tenure, he designed and conducted initiatives that brought together indigenous communities, CSOs, academia and government officials to improve governance of natural resources and indigenous territories in Latin America.