Francisco J. Monaldi, Ph.D. is the fellow in Latin American energy policy at the Center for Energy Studies, the Mexico Center and the Latin America Initiative at the Baker Institute and an adjunct professor of political economy of oil at Rice University. He is also an associate in the geopolitics of energy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a faculty associate in energy policy at the School of Government at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, where he directs the Program on Oil and Gas Management and Policy.
Monaldi is also the founding director and a professor at the Center for Energy and the Environment at IESA in Venezuela. From 2013 to 2015, he was a visiting professor of energy policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the Roy Family Fellow at the Environment and Natural Resources Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. From 2012 to 2013, he was the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Between 2013 and 2014, he was an adjunct professor of international energy policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. From 2008 to 2009, he was a visiting professor of the political economy of oil at Stanford University and a national fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting lecturer at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and Universidad ESAN in Lima.
Between 2002 and 2012 Monaldi was an associate professor of political economy at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas. He is a leading scholar on the politics and economics of the oil industry and oil wealth management in Latin America and developing countries. He has consulted with numerous international institutions, governments and companies, including The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Inter-American Development Bank, CAF Development Bank of Latin America, PDVSA, Shell, Total, Statoil, IHS, Wood Mackenzie, Ministry of Petroleum of Saudi Arabia, the governments of Kazakhstan and Albania, Natural Resource Governance Institute, Stanford Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, Eurasia Group and Medley Global Advisors.
Monaldi is on the board of directors of Mercantil, Venezuela’s leading financial group, and other Venezuelan companies and institutions. He has authored numerous academic publications, recently including “Institutional Collapse,” in Venezuela before Chavez: Anatomy of an Economic Collapse, R. Hausmann and F. Rodriguez, eds. (Penn State University Press, 2014); “Oil Fueled Centralism,” in Oil and Gas in Federal Systems, G. Anderson, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2012); and “The Political Economy of Oil Contract Renegotiation in Venezuela,” in The Natural Resources Trap: Private Investment without Public Commitment, W. Hogan and F. Struzenegger, eds. (MIT Press, 2010). He holds a Ph.D. in political science (political economy) from Stanford University, an M.A. in international and development economics from Yale University and a B.A. in economics from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello.
