Participant Overview

Ian A.Bowles

Ian A. Bowles 

Secretary
Executive Office of Environmental Affairs Massachusetts

Ian Bowles has nearly 20 years of experience in the energy and environmental sectors. He was a Director or Advisor to three clean energy technologies companies and has broad leadership experience with environmental policy. Bowles served in the Clinton Administration as Associate Director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and as Senior Director of the Global Environmental Affairs directorate at the National Security Council. In these positions, he played a key policymaking role on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol, on the negotiation of bilateral clean energy agreements between the United States and India and China and on numerous other areas of environmental policy. President Clinton also appointed Bowles to serve as the White House representative on the Enterprise for the Americas Board.

Following his service in the Clinton Administration, Bowles held appointments as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and as Senior Advisor at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a multibillion dollar charitable foundation established by Intel Corporation co-founder Gordon Moore. He oversaw the foundation’s strategic analysis of energy and climate change issues.

In 2003, Bowles was appointed President & CEO of MassINC, a Boston-based research institute, and as Publisher of CommonWealth magazine. MassINC is a unique, nonpartisan organization that brings together leaders from labor and business and other sectors to focus on long term economic, educational and quality of life challenges and opportunities in Massachusetts. Bowles more than doubled the organization’s base of members/sponsors, expanded its statewide media presence and built up MassINC’s role as a community opinion leader.

Earlier in his career, Bowles served for eight years in key leadership positions at Conservation International, a national environmental organization focused on biodiversity conservation. Bowles played a key role in the creation of one of the world’s largest tropical forest national parks: the four million acre Central Suriname Nature Reserve. His work also led to the creation of the $100 million Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund. Bowles began his career as a Legislative Assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Bowles serves on the Board of Overseers of the Museum of Science, where he chairs a board committee on green building issues, and on the Governing Board of the John Adams Innovation Institute, the economic stimulus grant-making agency of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. He is co-author of Footprints in the Jungle (Oxford University Press) on the energy and natural resource industries and environmental practices. In 1996, Bowles was a Democratic candidate for Congress from the Massachusetts 10th District.

A Cape Codder, Bowles grew up in Woods Hole and is a graduate of Falmouth High School. He holds an A.B. in economics cum laude from Harvard College and a Masters degree from Oxford University, where he remains an adjunct member of the teaching faculty at the graduate school of the Environment and Geography. He lives in Charlestown with his wife Hannah and one-year old daughter, Margaret.


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