Janot Mendler de Suarez

Visiting Research Fellow

Education

BA, Mount Holyoke College; MA, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Expertise

Experiential learning games and dialogue processes, trans-boundary water resource systems governance and management, climate change, human security, sustainable development, environmental negotiation, oceans policy, social and environmental equity, eco-agriculture and food security, green economy and blue society

Biography

Janot Mendler de Suarez is a founding member of the Pardee Center Task Force, Games for a New Climate, serves on the Council of Advisors for the Collaborative Institute on Oceans Climate and Security at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and chairs the Global Oceans Forum Working Group on Oceans and Climate. Mendler de Suarez was instrumental in the design, testing and development of the GEF International Waters Learning Exchange and Resource Network, or GEF-IW:LEARN.

With a 2011 grant, Mendler de Suarez designed a game-based series of workshops on resilience to help the Rockefeller Foundation enhance the impact and scope of current and future programming. With her husband and game-design partner, Pablo Suarez, Mendler de Suarez designed games to introduce a complex rainfall index insurance scheme for rural African farmers, and translated her strategic trends research for Oxfam America on Volatility: the New Normal? into an experiential learning game. She is interested in developing families of games that can be adapted for different kinds of climate change decision-making, from urban sustainability or investment in natural infrastructure, to gender and social protection games – including one for the Tanzanian government to roll out a climate change safety net program.