Joanne Lebert

Executive Director
IMPACT
Canada

May 21, 2019

Joanne Lebert is the Executive Director for IMPACT (formerly known as Partnership Africa Canada), an organization that focuses on improving natural resource management in areas where security and human rights are at risk. Joanne’s career began with experiences that she had while earning her Bachelor’s degree in International Development Studies. Her program had a cooperative component, which brought her to work in a refugee camp in Africa for a year. Since this formative experience, she has been working on issues in conflict-affected environments, initially on issues concerning refugees. She went on to earn an M.A. in Social Anthropology from York University in Toronto, and through her doctoral research has worked on issues of human rights, justice, and post-conflict peacebuilding in Southern Africa.  Her anthropological background partly explains her bottom-up approaches to environment, development, and security, Joanne’s career has focused on practice and more applied approaches. Her current work at IMPACT examines supply chain transparency of high-value and conflict-prone commodities, illicit trade and financing, environmental stewardship, gender equality, regulatory and legal reform in conflict-affected environments including as these relate to climate change. Prior to her current position as Executive Director of IMPACT, she has held positions as the Director of the Great Lakes (Africa) Programme at IMPACT, Coordinator of the POWER project: Progress and Opportunities for Women’s Equality Rights at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa, and Deputy Director of Peacebuild, Canada’s Peacebuilding Network. She also worked for Amnesty International, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and CARE International.

Joanne’s work with IMPACT focuses on natural resources in conflict-affected and high risk environments such as Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Uganda, Mali, and the African Great Lakes Region. Her work emphasizes integrating analyses of gender and identity to better understand how power, status, and lived experience interact with natural resource governance. This has meant developing an understanding of how gendered identities influence access, control, ownership, and decision-making as relates to natural resources. IMPACT has also focused on robust data collection and analysis to better understand the gendered dimension of supply chain and to more effectively support human rights, gender equality, and women’s economic empowerment in resource-rich and conflict-prone communities. In particular, Joanne’s work with IMPACT has applied micro and macro-economic analyses to artisanal mining to ensure that incentives favor responsible production and trade, gender equality, and transparency. She has also worked on issues of climate change adaptation, using a gender-sensitive approach to develop inclusive governance models that support both women and men in preventing conflict in a changing climate.

Joanne’s work with IMPACT more broadly has focused on developing holistic understandings of what commodities and natural resources mean within communities. In particular, this has meant unpacking and understanding the economic and cultural significance of a particular commodity and understanding its link to conflict and related economies to ensure that responsible supply chains and governance models are transformative and can be sustained over time. This work emphasizes the importance of understanding local actors and expertise through building bottom-up partnerships with community-based organizations and associations.

IMPACT is an institutional member of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association. Joanne explains IMPACT’s interest in environmental peacebuilding: “Environmental peacebuilding sums up a lot of our work, especially with looking at the nexus of environment, natural resources, peace and security. We look at how the mismanagement of natural resources can be a driver of insecurity, finance conflict, or exacerbate tensions. Then we develop models or identify leverage points to minimize these conflicts, and get to a point where we have evidence of which interventions or models can be associated with positive peace dividends.” Joanne further notes that the Association provides space for organizations that work at this nexus to not just expose causes of conflict around environment and natural resources, but share information, models, and solutions to improve equitable and fair distribution of resources, minimization of conflict, and promote positive peace.