Lisl Pullinger is a sustainability and social performance specialist with more than two decades of experience working at the intersection of business, communities, governance and development in Africa. She is the Managing Director of Vivid Advisory, a South African consultancy supporting mining, infrastructure and development-sector clients with policy advisory, stakeholder engagement, resettlement planning, human rights due diligence, grievance management, sustainability reporting and social performance strategy.
Her work has focused particularly on extractives, critical minerals and infrastructure projects across Southern and Central Africa, including the DRC, Zambia, South Africa, Tanzania and Botswana. She has supported complex projects involving land access, community relations, livelihood restoration, artisanal and small-scale mining, social risk, environmental and social impact processes, and the implementation of international sustainability standards in African operating contexts.
Lisl has a special interest in exploring how global sustainability and governance standards are interpreted, adapted and legitimised in African business environments. Her interest is grounded in a practical concern: why well-intentioned global frameworks often struggle to “land” in local contexts, and how organisations, institutions and communities can better identify and manage assumption-context mismatches.
She is particularly interested in legitimacy, voice, participation and the lived experience of people affected by governance systems. Her recent thought leadership project, 100 Portraits from a Sustainability Career, reflects on the people and forces that shape sustainability practice, from executives and practitioners to mine workers, community members and informal actors whose experiences are often absent from formal reports.
Through the ACCETT research fellowship, Lisl hopes to deepen her contribution to African-centred sustainability research, strengthen access to practitioners and field-based perspectives, and help generate knowledge that is academically rigorous, practically useful and rooted in the realities of African development contexts.
Research Interests
- Critical Minerals Governance & Sustainable Mining
- Social Performance, Human Rights & Community Engagement
- ESG, Responsible Business & Resource Governance
