Global challenges require a new kind of leadership: systems leadership

The world knows how to deliver essential public services to everyone. What unlocks it is political leadership. Patrick Moriarty has spent twenty-five years making that case in government offices, at global summits, in the kind of honest conversations with ministers that only a trusted advisor can have.

For two decades he has argued that water, sanitation and public services belong at the highest levels of government and worked to put them there. Through his work in Riva and as chair of Sanitation and Water for All, he helped build the Presidential Compact model – head-of-state commitments to water and sanitation – into a movement in more than ten countries. This is what systems leadership looks like in practice: shifting the conditions that determine whether nations can deliver for their people.

Patrick has been with Riva – and its predecessor IRC – since 2000. hat continuity has produced something rare: a leader with twenty-five years of accumulated understanding of what works, what fails, and what it actually takes to change a sector.  He helped build much of the intellectual framework the field now takes for granted – from systems thinking to systems strengthening to systems leadership. A Civil Engineer by training with a PhD in Water Resource Management, he brings technical grounding to debates that are about both politics and human behaviour – a combination that earns him credibility in rooms where both matter. He is Irish, based in the Hague, and lives in both The Hague and Bristol.

A few highlights

• Founder and Secretary General of the Riva Network – leading the transformation of IRC from a Dutch NGO into a federated global network of nationally-led organisations, a decade in the making
• Architect of the Presidential Compacts movement – head-of-state commitments to essential public services, now active in more than ten countries across Africa and Asia
• A twenty-five year record generating the evidence, tools and innovative thought leadership that’s helped reshape how the sector thinks. Co-developing the life-cycle costing approach to sustainable services, pioneering systems leadership in water and sanitation, and convening the All Systems Connect Symposium to connect water, health, climate and social justice
• Programme Director, Triple-S – a landmark systems-change programme supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, active across five continents
• Trusted advisor to governments, UN agencies, bilateral donors and major philanthropic foundations across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia
• Working languages: English and French