Marilu Hastings

Marilu Hastings works at the intersection of infrastructure, governance, regional development, and institutional legitimacy. For more than three decades, her work has focused on the societal, political, and institutional dynamics that increasingly determine whether large-scale infrastructure and resource systems succeed.

Many infrastructure conflicts emerge not from engineering constraints alone, but from institutional fragmentation, uneven impacts, competing priorities, and the absence of trusted governance frameworks. Hastings’ work has centered on helping organizations, regions, and institutions build the capacity necessary to navigate those conditions under periods of rapid technological and industrial change.

Through Meridian House, she advises organizations working across energy, water, AI infrastructure, industrial systems, philanthropy, and regional development on issues involving governance, stakeholder legitimacy, institutional strategy, and long-horizon infrastructure transition. Her work is grounded in a core belief: that economic growth, technological innovation, public legitimacy, and long-term regional resilience are not inherently opposing goals. Durable infrastructure systems increasingly depend on the ability to align them.

Hastings is the founder of the Permian Energy Development Lab (PEDL), a cross-sector regional initiative developed through the Mitchell Innovation Lab to explore integrated approaches to energy systems, workforce development, water management, infrastructure innovation, and regional economic resilience in the Permian Basin. The initiative brings together industry, universities, national laboratories, communities, and public institutions around a shared framework for long-term regional capacity-building.

Her work has also helped shape broader conversations surrounding infrastructure governance, stakeholder engagement, institutional adaptation, and sustainability science. She helped convene the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Energy Governance, which developed principles-based governance frameworks for shale development focused on stakeholder engagement, evidence-based decision-making, and regulatory excellence. More recently, her work has focused on the governance implications of rapid AI infrastructure growth and the increasingly interconnected relationships among energy, water, industrial systems, and regional development.

Before founding Meridian House, Hastings served for eighteen years as Executive Vice President of the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, where she led the Mitchell Innovation Lab, the foundation’s in-house incubator, and helped guide philanthropic investments across energy, water, land conservation, sustainability education, and regional systems initiatives.

Her intellectual approach has been shaped in part through longstanding engagement with sustainability science and the study of complex human-natural systems, including work associated with the National Academies initiative that produced the landmark report Our Common Journey. Across her career, she has focused on the relationship between knowledge, governance, implementation, institutional learning, and societal transition under conditions of complexity and uncertainty.

Hastings currently serves on the National Petroleum Council, chairs the University of Texas Energy Institute Advisory Board, serves on the Board of Visitors of the Bureau of Economic Geology, and advises national initiatives focused on sustainability, infrastructure, and resource governance.

She was raised in Midland, Texas, the daughter of a petroleum engineer and the fourth generation of a Texas Panhandle ranch family — a background that continues to shape her understanding of how infrastructure systems affect the communities, economies, and landscapes that sustain them.