Bård Vegar Solhjell hungrily tucked into a belated lunch at a trendy venue in downtown Oslo. The director general of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, or Norad, spent his morning helping open the agency’s annual conference, where his energetic opening speech at the conference focused on social cooperation.
His staff say Solhjell, formerly of the Socialist Left Party and minister of environmental protection under the government of Jens Stoltenberg, is impatient and likes to move fast. He’s also said to have done more to have asserted the independence of Norad from its parent Ministry of Foreign Affairs than predecessors.
But on the record with Devex he was a loyal civil servant, batting away criticism made by the conference’s opening speaker, Vanessa Nakate, who criticized the “hypocrisy” of the Norwegian government holding a climate conference while authorizing record fossil fuel drilling in the Arctic. Nakate also criticized Norway’s currently winding down Oil for Development program, which he defended as one of Norad’s most popular programs.