Richard Wilcox is a German and United States diplomat and public finance expert. He serves as the Director of Private Partnerships for the United Nations World Food Programme.

As a United Nations and African Union diplomat, Wilcox has led key development reform enterprises including the African Risk Capacity (ARC) to ensure African governments against natural disasters and was first to propose a levy on personal data extraction to finance aid for the elimination of extreme poverty. As head of the ARC, he also developed the first sovereign pandemic insurance program.
In 2008, Wilcox served as the UN Secretary-General's envoy to Serbia for the Kosovo independence process where he negotiated the SG Kosovo package, then the first agreement in the UN Security Council on Kosovo in a decade. He had previously served in UN political and peacekeeping missions in the former Yugoslavia (1995-1999) and Iraq (2003-2004, 2007) as well as Director of United Nations affairs on the US National Security Council (1999-2001). In 2017, his nomination as UN special envoy to Libya was withdrawn as Russia retaliated against US opposition to an earlier candidate.
Wilcox holds a Ph.D. from MIT (2000) and was a fellow at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies (1998). He has also taught political science at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.