Lalanath de Silva is the Managing Director at Transparentem, where he oversees programs, finance and human resources, and develops strategies on environmental justice, builds capacity and provides cohesion for achieving efficient outcomes. Lalanath has been active in public interest environmental law and policy for over four decades. He was the first Head of the Green Climate Fund’s Independent Redress Mechanism (IRM), where he established the mechanism, staffed it and developed its infrastructure and complaint handling procedures. He also established the Grievance Redress and Accountability Mechanism (GRAM) partnership, bringing together a community of practice around grievance redress mechanisms. He has extensive experience in legal affairs, with more than 40 years of service as a lawyer. In Sri Lanka, he co-founded the Environmental Foundation Ltd and the Public Interest Law Foundation, and practiced as a litigator for over two decades. He supported the Ministry of Environment as a legal consultant writing many of Sri Lanka’s environmental regulations and was a member of his country’s Law Commission. Lalanath previously worked at the Environmental Claims Unit of the UN Compensation Commission in Geneva, helping to process the environmental claims arising from the first Gulf War, and served as Director of the Environmental Democracy Practice at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington DC. As a member of the Compliance Review Panel of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), he led the review of multiple compliance cases. Lalanath has a PhD from the University of Sydney, a Master of Laws from the University of Washington, and graduated with honors from the Sri Lanka Law College as an Attorney-at-Law. He has also been trained as a mediator.
