Diana A. López Caramazana was born in Valladolid (Spain) in 1974. She obtained her BA on Political Sciences at the University of Granada and studied International Relations at the Robert Schuman University in Strasbourg (France), obtaining a Diploma at the Institute for Political Studies (IEP). As a graduate she attended AMLOG (Advanced Management of Local Governance) at the University of Birmingham (UK) leading to her MSc on Public Service Management.
She has been dedicated to issues related to local governance and the role of local governments in international development since 1997 when she started working at the UN System as Information Manager at the International Labour Organisation – ILO, providing expertise on local economic development for local governments in Latin America. In 2003 she was detached by the ILO to the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, contributing to build tools for economic internationalisation for Italian regional governments. In 2006 she moved to UN-HABITAT, the UN Programme for Human Settlements, where she was Head of the Spanish Office for Best Practices and Local Leadership until 2010, working mainly on the promotion of decentralisation and in city-to-city co-operation. She was Special Assistant of the Executive Director of UN-Habitat from 2010- 2013 when she moved back to work in the field of local governance. She is actually Head of the Local Government and Decentralization Unit at UN-Habitat headquarters in Nairobi, where she works in areas related to the role of local governments in achieving the SDGs, urban governance, transparency and open local government and innovation in municipal management and finance. Recently, she has been member of the Steering Committee of the London School of Economics research on “New urban governance” and reviewer of the 2018 World Public Sector Report. She is fluent in Spanish, English, Italian and French, with some knowledge of Arabic and Portuguese.