Koldo Echebarria was appointed director general of Esade in 2018. He has occupied a variety of senior positions in both the public and private sectors and the academic world. His career began at the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht, as a professor and researcher, where he adopted management reform initiatives for the European Commission. He then entered the private sector as head of the Public Sector Division at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in Spain.
In 1992, he returned to the academic world as a professor at Esade Business School where he co-founded the current Esade Centre for Public Governance. He developed his methodology and experience mainly in post-grad courses, focussing above all on the convergence of theory and practice in public and private management. During his eight years in teaching, he established long-lasting partnerships with European and North American universities and business schools.
In 2000, he joined the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington DC, where he worked for 18 years in senior management roles in two periods. The most important one entailed the design and implementation of public sector reforms in many countries in South America, ending with his appointment firstly as the national representative in Chile for five years and, since 2016, as national representative in Haiti. Prior to this he was the director general of Strategic Planning and Development in charge of establishing the corporate strategy of the IDB and designing its lending mechanisms, amongst other responsibilities.