Santiago Gowland

Santiago Gowland is the Executive Vice President of Global Innovation and Managing Director for the Latin America Region with The Nature Conservancy. Santiago serves on TNC’s Executive Team, bringing experience in business, law, marketing and innovation to lead TNC’s global strategies into a larger scale.

Santiago also leads more than 300 staff based in 16 countries across conservation strategy teams and supporting functions. He has accrued over 15 years of experience in driving business innovation and sustainability strategy, and has applied this knowledge in different sectors, cultures, and regions.

Prior to joining the Conservancy, Santiago was Senior Vice President of Global Corporate Innovation at The Estee Lauder Companies, Inc., where he drove innovation strategy, and introduced tools and capabilities to support more than 30 leading companies in the beauty luxury sector. Before that, Santiago led the Systems Innovation function at Nike, Inc. leading work with public and private partnerships that scaled up sustainability strategies and innovation to enable system change. He led Nike’s collaboration with groups such as NASA, the U.S. State Department and USAID to develop launch.org, which searches for world-changing sustainable business innovations. Prior to Nike, Santiago was VP for Global Sustainable Development and Corporate Brand Strategy for Unilever PLC, leading the integration of sustainable agriculture, fisheries and water corporate programs into all of Unilever’s categories and brands.

Santiago was born in Argentina, and earned his law degree from the Catholic University in Buenos Aires and his M.B.A. at Thunderbird School of Global Management in the United States. He now lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina with his wife Magdalena, his daughter Gaia, and his son Max.