Prof Dr Peter Eigen is co-founder and partner of the Berlin Governance Platform gGmbH. Prof Eigen heads the Governance Platform's governance projects.
Prof Dr Peter Eigen has been working in the fields of economic development and governance for decades and leads several initiatives to improve global governance and fight corruption.
As a lawyer and programme manager, Peter Eigen worked for the World Bank in Africa and Latin America. From 1983 to 1988 he was Programme Director for Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay and Uruguay. At that time, Latin America was suffering its worst debt crisis and the work of Peter Eigen and his team included policy advice, project and structural adjustment financing - particularly in Argentina, Chile and Peru. After 1988 he was Director of the World Bank's Regional Mission for East Africa. For the Ford Foundation, Dr Eigen provided legal and technical assistance to the governments of Botswana and Namibia to strengthen the legal framework for investment in the mining sector.
In 1993, Peter Eigen founded Transparency International (TI), a non-governmental organisation that promotes transparency and accountability in international development. Dr Eigen was Chairman of TI from 1993 to 2005 and is now Chairman of the TI Advisory Board. During this time, he founded the Partnership for Transparency Funds and is still on its board today. In 2005, Eigen was Chairman of the Founding Committee of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and from 2006-2011 Chairman of the EITI International Board.
Prof Eigen has taught law and politics at the Universities of Frankfurt / M, Harvard, SAIS / Johns Hopkins, University of Washington and the Bruges College of Europe Law and Political Science. From 2002 to 2014, he taught political science at the Free University of Berlin. In 2000, he received an honorary doctorate from the Open University, UK. In 2004 he received the Readers Digest Award "European of the Year 2004" and in 2007 the Gustav Heinemann Citizen's Prize. In recognition of his efforts to combat corruption at a global level, Dr Eigen was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in January 2013.
Eigen has been a member of Kofi Annan's Africa Progress Panel (APP) since 2007. From 2009-2012, he was on the Management Board of the African Legal Support Facility at the African Development Bank. From 2007 to 2012, he was on the board of the Centre for International Environmental Law (CIEL) in Washington.
Until 2012, Eigen was the founding chairman of the International Civil Society Centre. He has been on the board of the NGOs Kabissa and German Doctors since 2008. He has been on the Advisory Board of the Columbia Centre for Sustainable Investment (New York) since 2010 and on the Advisory Board of the Natural Resources Institute (formerly Natural Resources Charter, Oxford) since 2013. He has been a member of the Senior Advisory Board of the IACA since 2023.