Head of Forest Crime

Location

Latin America (flexible within region)

Contract Duration

Two-year fixed term with possibility of extension depending on extension or renewal

Language Preference

Essential (non-negotiable) : Spanish & English

Desirable : French

Background

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) is an independent civil society organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with a globally dispersed Secretariat working across 42 countries. Founded in 2013, GI-TOC brings together a global network of more than 750 independent experts and a team of over 130 staff dedicated to understanding and responding to organized crime. Through research, analysis, policy engagement and support to civil society actors, GI-TOC works to deepen understanding of organized crime and strengthen effective, rights-based responses. In 2024, GI-TOC produced 167 publications and reached more than 713,000 website users worldwide.

The GI-TOC works to:

• Identify, analyse and map criminal trends and patterns of regional instability, and their impact on illicit flows, governance, development, security, conflict and the rule of law.
• Connect and support civil society actors working on organized crime and corruption, and on their links to instability and conflict.
• Strengthen local monitoring and analysis of national, regional and international organized crime and insecurity trends.

Job Summary

The GI-TOC is seeking an experienced Head of Forest Crime to be GI-TOC’s senior thematic authority on deforestation driven by criminal activity and lead the delivery of its NICFI-funded multi-country forest crime initiative.

Across the tropical forest countries, deforestation is not primarily a story of smallholder encroachment or legal agribusiness — it is driven by organised criminal networks that coordinate land grabbing, illegal logging, illegal agribusiness and artisanal mining, laundering proceeds through cattle ranching, timber trading, and commodity supply chains that reach global markets. These networks operate across jurisdictions, exploit regulatory gaps, corrupt institutions, and use violence to hold territory. Disrupting them requires intelligence, enforcement pressure, private sector accountability, and community resilience — applied simultaneously and with precision.

The NICFI project represents a direct intervention against the criminal networks driving tropical deforestation - one of the most consequential environmental challenges of our time. By generating intelligence, activating law enforcement, strengthening private sector due diligence, empowering frontline communities, and driving policy change, the project applies coordinated pressure across the full forest crime supply chain.

This role is grounded in the Amazon basin (Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador), reflecting where the majority of the consortium's partner organisations and in-country operations are concentrated, but its scope stretches across key tropical forest regions to Central Africa (DRC and Gabon) and Indonesia.

The Head of Forest Crimes ensures that a fifteen-member partner consortium, seven country teams, and specialist staff deliver on time, to standard, and within budget. They translate strategic direction into coherent workplans, hold a large and dispersed network to account, and surface problems early enough to fix them. They provide expert guidance to staff and project partners, quality assurance, and accountability on delivery.

The ideal candidate for this role understands forest crime from the inside — how criminal networks are structured, how evidence holds up in enforcement contexts, how to operate credibly with law enforcement partners in politically complex environments — and who can translate that expertise into a programme that delivers impact at scale. They are capable of managing relationships across law enforcement culture, civil society, indigenous community organisations, and institutional donors with equal fluency.

This role reports to the Director of Environmental Crime programmes in Geneva and works in coordination with the Multilateral Engagement Team in Vienna, with expert support on community engagement and private sector engagement from the global policy team. The operational mechanics of grant management, financial tracking, and reporting are supported by a grants officer and project assistant. The Head of Forest Crime owns the investigative and law enforcement core, integrates outputs across the project, and is accountable for overall delivery.

Works Closely With

– The four GI-TOC Observatory Heads, Directors and focal points covering the seven priority countries

– The fifteen consortium partners

– The Director of Environmental Crime

– The Director of Multilateral Engagement, experts in private sector engagement and community engagement.

– GI-TOC Finance and Operations, the Director of Programme Management

Main responsibilities and specific tasks

Consortium Management & Partner Coordination

• Serve as the primary operational relationship manager for fifteen consortium partners across seven countries, ensuring delivery against agreed workplans, reporting requirements, and quality standards
• Develop and maintain a consortium coordination architecture — regular calls, regional meetings, shared tracking tools — that keeps a dispersed network aligned without creating bureaucratic overhead
• Oversee sub-grant management: workplan review and sign-off, financial compliance monitoring, reporting oversight, performance follow-up, and escalation to the Director of Environmental Crime where partners are underperforming
• Work with the four GI-TOC Observatory Heads and country focal points to ensure national-level activities are coherent, well-sequenced, and mutually reinforcing across workstreams
• Identify capacity gaps among consortium partners and propose targeted responses; support partners in navigating GI-TOC systems and donor requirements
• Ensure the onboarding of all consortium partners at project inception, including security protocol briefings, whistleblowing mechanism orientation, and sub-grant agreement execution

Programme Delivery

• Manage the project's operational cycle across all seven countries and five workstreams, ensuring activities are delivered on scope, on schedule, and on budget
• Develop and maintain project workplans, milestone trackers, and internal reporting dashboards; flag deviations early and propose corrective action
• Coordinate preparation for and follow-up from all key project milestones: Inception Meeting, annual reviews, pause-and-reflect sessions, and the Validation Meeting

Financial & Operational Management

• Monitor budget expenditure against projections across all budget lines and countries; work closely with the Director of Programme Management and Finance on ensuring compliance and accountability with partners and ensuring timely reporting and audit readiness.
• Oversee procurement and contracting processes in line with GI-TOC and NICFI requirements
• Ensure security protocols, digital safety standards, and risk management plans are implemented and updated across all countries, in line with the project Risk Matrix

Reporting and Knowledge

• Coordinate production of donor reports (quarterly, annual, mid-term, final), drawing on country and workstream inputs;
• Oversee maintenance of project knowledge products: case management system data, baseline documentation, MEAL records
• Ensure the production of accurate, timely, synthesis-level programme data for donor and strategic engagements
  
  

Team Management

• Line-manage the Project Assistant, Communications and MEAL Officer; set clear objectives, support professional development, and maintain a high-performance team culture
• Foster a project-wide culture of accountability, learning, and security-consciousness across staff and partners
  
  

Requisite Skills, Experience & Qualifications

• Minimum 6-9 years' experience in programme or project management in the international NGO, think-tank, or multilateral sector
• Demonstrated expertise in illegal deforestation — including knowledge of criminal typologies, supply chain structures, enabling actors (land grabbers, corrupt officials, timber traders, financial intermediaries), and the relationship between deforestation and organised crime
• Strong project management skills — demonstrated ability to manage multi-partner, multi-country programmes against workplans and budgets, and to hold large networks to account
• Experience working in complex, sensitive, or politically difficult operational environments — this could include organised crime, environmental crime, conflict, anti-corruption, human rights, or security-adjacent programming
• Experience working in Latin America; deep familiarity with the political and operational context of at least one project country
• Fluency in Spanish and English, written and oral — non-negotiable; interviews will be conducted in both languages
  

Desirable

• Experience with programmes to counter illegal mining — particularly artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) and its intersection with deforestation, organised crime, and violence in the Amazon basin
• Familiarity with open-source investigative methods (OSINT), satellite imagery analysis, financial tracing, or other evidence-gathering techniques relevant to environmental crime
• French language skills
• Existing networks among law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, or judicial actors in the priority countries

Personal Attributes

• Operationally oriented: you make things happen and don't lose track of what isn't happening
• Politically intelligent: you understand how to work in sensitive environments with law enforcement, community partners, and institutional donors without creating problems
• A clear communicator: you can write a sharp synthesis for the Director of Environmental Crimes and a patient explanation for a partner in the same afternoon
• Resilient and adaptive: you are able to work across complex multi-country programmes operating in unpredictable contexts – including when things don’t go according to plan
• Collegiate but direct: you hold a large consortium to account without drama

GI-TOC operates a flexible working environment and encourages staff to achieve a suitable work-life balance and supports professional development and learning.

Only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

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