Sven Behrendt is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment.
Sven Behrendt was a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center. He is a specialist in corporate strategy and political risk management and has a profound understanding of the forces that are at the base of the rapid transformations of the world’s political and economic systems. Most recently, he focused his attention on Sovereign Wealth Funds from emerging economies as agents of change in global finance and in the broader context of the shifting power equation in the global economy.
Before his appointment, he served at the World Economic Forum in various management positions, making a substantial contribution turning the Forum into a global knowledge-based multi-stakeholder platform. Most recently he headed the Forum’s mining and metals industry practice, working together with industry leaders on a joint global agenda for the extractive sector.
Prior to his assignment at the World Economic Forum, he was Research Fellow at the Bertelsmann Foundation’s policy think tank, the Bertelsmann Group on Policy Research, where he facilitated political dialogue between European and the Middle Eastern policy makers, resulting in numerous diplomatic breakthroughs.
Behrendt is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Selected publications:
Europe and the Middle East: Bound to Cooperate (with Christian-Peter Hanelt, Guetersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation, 2000); The Secret Israeli-Palestinian Talks in Oslo: Their Success and Why the Process Ultimately Failed (London: Routledge, 2007); “The Statecraft of Business,” in Strategy and Business (2007).
The possibility that Lebanon might benefit from exploiting massive off-shore natural resources in the eastern Mediterranean has provoked a debate about establishing a sovereign wealth fund to manage the accumulated revenues.
The uneasy yet robust energy supply and demand relationship linking the industrialized economies of the West and the oil producers of the Gulf region may be changing as both parties seek to distance themselves from what they perceive as an unhealthy dependence on oil.
The G20 still has far to go in terms of reforming the global financial system and calming the lingering economic turmoil, but the experience of sovereign wealth funds provides a useful outline for what is possible.
The Santiago Principles and the commitment of their sponsors—some of the biggest sovereign wealth funds—are an important test for the viability of new forms of global governance.
Implementation of the Santiago Principles is highly uneven and there is still far to go if sovereign wealth funds are to be responsible members of the global economy.
Not only have Sovereign Wealth Funds become a contentious issue for Western policy makers, but their risk/return profile should also be of major concern for the Arab public, since the future economic well-being of Arab societies is at stake.
Though sovereign wealth funds, valued at $2.4 trillion globally, played a stabilizing role during the crisis, their widely varying governance standards may pose geopolitical risks in the future.
Since the start of the financial crisis, questions about sovereign wealth funds, which had $3.9 trillion in assets in 2008, have been at the forefront of discussions regarding financial stability and global politics.
In the wake of the global financial crisis, the Saudis cannot be comforted to know that their economic fortunes are so closely related to events beyond their borders. The Saudi leadership will look to the G20 process to help make these markets less volatile and easier to navigate.
Policy makers who only 18 months ago identified Arab foreign investment as a major threat to national security and economic competitiveness are now actively reaching out to them.