When you hire MSP, you get Gary MacDonald.

The Story

Gary MacDonald has spent 35 years building and fixing social performance for major projects in difficult places.

He has created social performance teams for multi-billion-dollar extractive, energy, and conservation projects across four continents. He has directed complex due diligence assessments for international financial institutions including the IFC, EBRD, and Equator Principles banks. And he has managed crisis response in active conflict zones, post-disaster communities, and politically volatile environments.

What makes Gary different is the combination. He brings IFC Performance Standards expertise trusted by the institutions themselves, field-level team building from recruitment through operational independence, board-level advisory on human rights and conflict, and a track record of managing high-risk situations that most practitioners have never faced.

Gary founded and led Monkey Forest Consulting for over two decades, growing it to 85 full-time staff delivering social performance management worldwide. Before that, he served as Director of Social Development at Newmont Mining Corporation — the first person in that role for what was then the world's pre-eminent gold miner — and built a 60-person external affairs team for the Batu Hijau copper-gold project in Indonesia.

His client base spans mining, oil and gas, hydro, forestry, agriculture, renewables, finance, and land development. He has worked across Indonesia, Peru, Bolivia, Panama, Guatemala, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Mongolia, New Caledonia, Vietnam, Ivory Coast, Uganda, Argentina, Chile, the Philippines, the DRC, and across Europe and North America.

He brings all of that to every engagement.