Vegard Bye

Vegard Bye (born 19 March 1951) is a Norwegian political scientist and consultant, specializing in Latin America as a region and governance, human rights and democracy as thematic areas. He is a partner in the Oslo-based consulting company Scanteam.^[1] Simultaneously, he holds a part-time position as adjunct research fellow at The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI),^[2] where he has written various articles on Cuba^[3] and Bolivia.

Up until 2008, he held several senior positions in the UN system, as Representative of the High Commissioner for Human Rights both in Angola and Bolivia.

Prior to that, he had a multi-faceted career as civil servant (with Norad, Norwegian Agency forInternational Development), NGO leader (Executive Director, Forum forDevelopment and the Environment), reporter and author.

He served as a Deputy Representative to the Norwegian Parliament from Oslo during the term 1993–1997, representing the Socialist Left Party.

As a consultant, he has over the last 20 years – before and after his UN career – carried out more than 60 major assignments, most of them as team leader, comprising practically all countries in Latin America and more than a dozen countries in Africa and Asia.^[4] Listed below are some of his key consulting qualifications:·

• Team leadership of international, multi-sector, complex evaluations, i.a. in conflict /post-conflict and fragile state situations·
• Management of complex and politically challenging human rights programmes (including indigenous rights)in countries with various degrees of commitment to human rights and good governance·
• Work with civil society,parliaments and watchdog institutions, media and access to information – all as part of pluralistic and participatory democracy-building and rights-based development·
• Democracy and democratic consolidation in conflict and post-conflict societies (as a matter of academic as well as practical concern)·
• Management of humanitarian support, including protection according to international humanitarian law·
• Management of natural and extractive resources, natural disaster preparedness, particularly in terms of political and institutional aspects

(See links to some of the more recent consulting reports where he has contributed.)

Bye is fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese and has a good command of French and German, in addition to his native Norwegian.

He has written a large number of articles and several books on Latin American subjects (see list of publications). Most of the books are in Norwegian but two of them are also translated to Spanish:

Mellom-Amerika: Når vulkanen våkner. Universitetsforlaget (Oslo), 1982.^[5]

Forbudenfred. Det store spillet om Mellom-Amerika i åtti-åra. Cappelen (Oslo),1990.^[6]

La Paz Prohibida. El laberinto centroamericano en la década de los ochenta. DEI (San José / Costa Rica),1991^[7]

Dette er Cuba - alt annet er løgn (together with med Dag Hoel). Spartacus (Oslo), 1996 (5th edition2006) Estoes Cuba – lo demás es cuento. Ediciones La Otra Cuba (Ciudad de Mexico), 1998^[8]

Bolívars uekte sønner – Det nye Sør-Amerika mellom Chávez og Lula. Spartacus (Oslo), 2010^[9]

(Some evaluations Vegard Bye has been a part of through Scanteam:

Norad’s Evaluation Department decided that after about six years of activities Oil for Development (OfD) should be evaluated,with a focus on assessing the results of the approach OfD provides, but also to see if there are areas where the program ought to adjust its operations. The report provides the main findings, conclusions and recommendations of the team contracted to carry out the study on the Oil for Development.^[10]

He was part of the task team who did the Review of the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund for the World Bank, to assess the strategic positioning of the ARTF in the context of the changing needs that the Afghan transition implies. The review will consider how ARTF operations, management, and resourcing should evolve over the period to ensure it has the capacity to be a main conduit for international on-budget assistance to the Afghan government.^[11])

References