Local Development Projects

Across nearly five years, I worked with a range of municipalities and local governments in Costa Rica on planning, reorganization, and public-policy projects: Montes de Oca, Vázquez de Coronado, Barva, Esparza, and the Concejo Municipal de Distrito de Monteverde, among others. The projects varied in scope, from single diagnostic studies to multi-year organizational engagements, but the throughline was always the same: helping local governments understand their own institutions and communities well enough to plan for them.

Much of this work combined the same set of tools regardless of canton: participatory workshops with municipal staff and elected councils, direct engagement with citizens to surface local priorities, and analysis of administrative and diagnostic data on municipal processes, human resources, and strategy. In Montes de Oca, this meant supporting the municipality’s reorganization and co-authoring a local economic-development policy that positioned the technology sector as an engine of cantonal growth, work that helped the municipality become a leader in local economic performance. In Vázquez de Coronado, I helped build a process and procedures manual; in Barva, a cantonal development plan, a municipal strategic plan, and a system of performance indicators; in Esparza, a review of the organizational structure and a competency-based redesign of its human-resources tools.

I also worked with the Concejo Municipal de Distrito de Monteverde and supported DINADECO’s National Community Development Plan, moderating participatory workshops with communities across the country. Across all of these engagements, the work sat at the intersection of local economic development, organizational design, and citizen participation, the same combination I still bring to public-sector consulting today.