Carlos A. Pineda Pinel is a Honduran attorney, institutional designer, and founder of Developing Concept Consulting. He acts as Of Counsel at Ixian for specific matters. He is one of the lead architects of Honduras's ZEDE (Zones for Employment and Economic Development) framework, one of the most ambitious governance and economic development experiments in the world.

Carlos has almost thirty years of professional practice focused on special economic zones, public-private partnership architecture, regulatory design, and international arbitration, advising governments, developers, and investors across Latin America and Africa. Amongst many other reforms, he served as a lead legal architect of the ZEDE enabling legislation and was appointed Alternate Secretary of the Committee for the Adoption of Best Practices (CAMP), the ZEDEs' national oversight where he served until 2021.

He co-authored Honduras's Promotion and Protection of Investments Law, helped design the enabling legislation, then supported the launch of its Public-Private Partnership programme as both board member and later regulator. He also helped build the country's e-government legal framework, including miempresaenlinea.org, Central America's first online business incorporation platform, used by over 23,000 entrepreneurs.

Carlos holds an MBA from IE Business School and a Master's in Corporate Law from UNITEC, with additional training at the University of Oxford (Law and Saïd Business School) and Harvard's Kennedy School. He has spoken before the Inter-American Development Bank and other international institutions, and has litigated before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

He is the author of the upcoming book The Fortress Builders: A Memoir of Reform, Resistance, and Institutional Survival (working title).