About me

I am an anthropologist, a Norwegian citizen, and I live partly in Kristiansand, Norway (where I was raised) and partly in Sofia, Bulgaria. I work professionally in international development cooperation, and travel substantially. My areas of interests and expertise are, inter alia, capacity development, community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), ethnic and cultural minorities, inclusion, monitoring and evaluation, participation, project management, social/cultural aspects of climate change, social/institutional analyses, and transparency.

With the increasingly complex issues that development cooperation addresses, my preferred way to work is through teamworks based in interdisciplinary approaches. I work partly through my two consulting firms Supras Limited, registered in Norway (https://www.supras.biz/) and Bulgaria (https://www.supras.bg/), which work on project management, social/institutional analyses, and local capacity development, and partly on contracts with public sector and private sector entities.

I also work through two NGOs I have established, CBNRM Networking (https://cbnrm.org/ and https://www.cbnrm.net/), registered in Norway, and Bulgarian Monitoring and Evaluation Network (https://www.evaluation.bg/en), registered in Bulgaria. Finally, I place great emphasis on involving, connecting, working with, and empowering all relevant stakeholders, as available in public sector, private sector, and civil society.

This blog to a large extent functions as an outlet for more personal thoughts on working in international development cooperation (see "Welcome to Devblog" at: https://www.devblog.no/en/).

In terms of life away from the laptop, research, traveling, and writing, depending on the season I have a preference for cross-country skiing, fishing (especially fly-fishing), mountain hiking, music (art music, popular music, and traditional music), and picking berries (wild and domesticated) and turning them into all sorts of goodies.

Lars T. Soeftestad /  Lars T Søftestad