Our Partners

Sally Davidson, B.A., M.A., M.C.P.

un vehucle 3.jpg Sally Davidson, B.A.,M.A., M.C.P., has a Bachelor of Archaeology, Master of Arts in Social Anthropology and a Master of City Planning. Prior to co-founding Blackstone in 1991, Sally developed one of Canada's first firms dedicated to sustainable development, growing it to 17 staff over four years.

Social Assessment, Engagement & Sustainability Planning Experience

Sally has directed a wide range of multi-disciplinary assignments across Canada and in over 35 countries around the world. Some representative assignments include social assessments for a number of World Bank projects in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) including Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Serbia and Bulgaria. This post-conflict and post-Soviet Union work was highly sensitive, and encompassed many sectors.

Sally has overseen major environmental and social assessment projects (ESIAs), including: a 115 km highway in Ecuador; an environmental programming strategy for the 15 Commonwealth Caribbean Countries; waste management and institutional strengthening project for several countries/regions; and urban management strategies, such as the design of a multi-million dollar loan to the Government of Azerbaijan for the provision of housing and social infrastructure for persons displaced by war.

As an applied anthropologist, Sally has long-standing interest and experience in conducting assignments involving indigenous, minority and vulnerable populations. Among others, she has worked with over 25 First Nations and Inuit communities in Canada, Roma populations throughout Eastern Europe, Mayan communities in Central America, and local villages in many countries.

Sally oversees the design and implementation of both qualitative and quantitative survey methodologies for each project. This work often includes specifically designed qualitative tringulation approaches that have been cited as best practice, generating highly useful and accurate information under difficult circumstances, such as in post-conflict situations and/or where census data is unavailable.

For over 25 years, Sally has worked on projects that directly require an integrated sustainable development systems approach. Based on this experience, Blackstone produced a highly regarded Sustainability Planning Toolkit for Ontario’s municipalities for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and provided training on sustainability planning in many municipalities.

Sally is highly interested in developing realistic and cost-effective sustainability planning approaches for private sector enterprises. In 2010, for example, she directed a complex multi-country evaluation for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), to evaluate how a variety of private sector companies funded by IFC are interacting with local communities, as part of the agency's efforts to update their Sustainability Performance Standards.

Tourism Experience:

Sally has directed a large number of multi-disciplinary tourism assignments throughout Canada and in numerous countries around the world, for clients such as the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Canadian International Development Agency, national, regional and local governments, and the private sector. She is the firm’s senior expert responsible for tourism land use planning, product analysis and development, safeguards and best practices, and legislation/policy development. Her work in over 35 countries, along with eco and adventure travel in some 70 countries, has given her extensive experience in observing “lessons learned” from study of a vast array of tourism products. Given the fact that supply has outstripped demand for tourism products in many parts of the world, the highly competitive nature of the sector, and the fragmented nature of today’s tourism markets, it is imperative that new tourism developments be carefully planned if they are to succeed. Sally’s experience helps to design plans that are responsive to market demands, natural conditions, institutional realities, local capacities and financial considerations, and are sustainable over the long term.

Sally has acted as Project Director for a large cultural heritage and alternative tourism planning project for two large municipalities in China, which resulted in a major World Bank loan to Ningbo and Shaoxing cities for tourism development. She has carried out major eco/cultural tourism planning projects throughout the Canadian Arctic over the past 20 years. She has worked regularly for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada as a due diligence reviewer for large scale tourism projects, such as carrying out a comprehensive study of a $12 million dollar river cruise and multi-lodge development in Yukon Territory. She also was Project Director for the National Ecotourism Plan for Belize, which resulted in a multi-million dollar loan to the government from the Inter-America Development Bank and has been cited by the Bank as representing “Best Practice” in regard to tourism planning. Other examples of her work include the development of a tourism plan for the ecologically sensitive Bolivian Pantanal region, where she designed “The World’s Longest Wetland Walkway”, tourism plans for Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Turkey, and developments in many other countries.

Barbara Lamb

BARBARA LAMB, B.E.S., M.Sc.

Barbara Lamb has a Masters Degree in Urban & Regional Planning and an Honours Bachelor of Environmental Studies with a strong economics component. A co-founder and co-owner of Blackstone, she has worked in Canada and in over 40 countries over the course of her career.

She has become progressively involved with development and leadership of the company’s Sustainability Planning and Reporting Services. Blackstone’s practice in this area has grown rapidly in response to the increasing demand by public and private sector clients for strategic approaches that effectively integrate the inputs of stakeholders into the development of long-term sustainable projects, programmes and operations. Barbara is GRI-certified (Global Reporting Initiative) and ascribes to ISO 26000 for Social Responsibility. Speaking Spanish, Barbara generally oversees the company’s Latin American projects in association with our office manager located in La Paz, Bolivia.

Stakeholder Engagement, Social Assessment & Sustainability Experience

Barbara has participated in all of Blackstone’s Stakeholder Engagement and Social Assessment (SE-SA) assignments undertaken on behalf of both public and private sector clients to ensure that the wide range of stakeholder interests are understood and addressed. She specializes in economic and financial analyses, institutional/organizational and capacity analyses, and monitoring and evaluation plans, including performance indicators. In these capacities, Barbara was, for example, a part of Blackstone’s assignment to review, from the perspective of affected stakeholders, the effectiveness of the International Finance Corporation’s Sustainability Performance Standards (established to guide the activities of companies receiving IFC financing to operate in lesser-developed areas) in regard to companies in nine countries.

Much of her participation in Blackstone’s SE-SA work has involved intensive stakeholder engagement and needs assessments (e.g., development of a $48 million loan in Azerbaijan for social infrastructure to improve the lives of Internally Displaced Persons – IDPs; land use and minority rights in Serbia; transportation in Bosnia; indigenous land rights in Belize, etc.). She worked with a private sector entity to identify impacts associated with a proposed major expansion of tourism in Aruba, including labour and immigration issues and solutions. She has prepared detailed operational manuals for matching grants and revolving funds to enable local communities and stakeholders receive funding for projects and businesses.

In recent years, Barbara has been Project Director for a series of environmental sustainability-related assignments, including the development of a leading-edge Sustainability Planning Guide for all of Ontario’s Municipalities, which, among others, described best practice approaches to municipal sustainability planning. She has led numerous training sessions attended by hundreds of municipal representatives. This sustainability work builds on international environmental management assignments undertaken, among others, in 13 countries of the Caribbean and on several projects undertaken in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Tourism Experience

Barbara is a highly seasoned professional tourism planner. Her tourism background extends back to the 1980s, when she worked for one of the world’s largest hospitality industry firms undertaking market and financial feasibility studies for a variety of domestic and international tourism attractions and accommodations properties. As the description of Blackstone’s tourism services describes, Barbara has taken a lead role in developing and implementing leading edge methodologies to accurately identify market niches and forecast market demand (which is crucial in this market-driven industry). She, along with the other co-founder of Blackstone, Sally Davidson, has created a highly useful “Tourism Scale” which provides a sustainability planning tool to governments that incorporates considerations of cultural and natural carrying capacity and environmental fragility. The scale enables the planner to identify the need for increasingly strict tourism management guidelines as one moves along the scale towards “deep” ecotourism.

In 2010-2011, Barbara was Project Director for the preparation of a comprehensive Community-Based Tourism Loan for Bolivia that has successfully resulted in a $20 million loan to the country from the Inter-American Development Bank. She was also involved in a large and complex World Bank-funded cultural heritage tourism project in China, which encouraged the Chinese government to increase an infrastructure-oriented loan significantly to implement the Tourism Plan that Blackstone produced. She has also been Manager recently of tourism-related planning and due diligence assignments in Aruba and in Canada’s Yukon Territory and Nunavut, where the aim was to ensure that proposed large tourism developments were financially feasible and sustainable.