Jan Aart Scholte, convener from Western Europe, is Professorial Research Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick and Centennial Professor in the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics. He has also held appointments at the University of Sussex (1985-96), the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (1997-8), and Gothenburg University (2006-7).

He is author of Globalization: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 second edition), Civil Society and Democracy in the Global Economy (CSGR, 2004), Civil Society Voices and the International Monetary Fund (North-South Institute, 2002) and International Relations of Social Change (Open University Press, 1993); co-author of Contesting Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2000); editor of Civil Society and Global Finance (Routledge, 2002) and Global Citizenship in Action? Civil Society and Accountable Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); and co-editor of The Encyclopaedia of Globalization (Routledge, 2006) and the journal Global Governance (since 2005).

He has sat on advisory and steering committees of inter alia the Global Accountability Project, the Globalization and Autonomy Project, the Globalization Studies Network, and the Non-Governmental Public Action Programme. He has worked with many academic, official, civil society, business and mass media actors on questions of democracy in global affairs.

When asked about his aspirations for the Building Global Democracy programme, Jan replied:

"It is so important that the emergent more global world be one where people are able self-consciously to shape their common life and shared destiny. The politics of globalization are so often overwhelmed by ecological, economic and military crises that democracy gets lost in the shuffle. Hopefully BDG can help to turn the spotlight also on global democracy and generate lots of innovative ideas about how to do it."