David Brown became interested in international development issues in the mid-1960s while working as a Peace Corps community development worker in Ethiopia.

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By Admin1 (admin) on Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 11:17 am: Edit Post



David Brown became interested in international development issues in the mid-1960s while working as a Peace Corps community development worker in Ethiopia.

Profile: David Brown
Associate Director
for International Programs

Key to the Hauser Center's mission is a commitment to learn more about the role that the nonprofit, non-governmental sector plays in the international community. In order to develop its capacity to achieve this part of the mission, the Hauser Center is thrilled to announce that it has appointed Dr. L. David Brown to the newly created position of Associate Director for International Programs. David Brown has researched, taught and provided consulting services to development organizations in the areas of institutional development and strategy, intersectoral and inter-organizational conflict management, and participatory action research for over twenty five years.
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Brown says that he became interested in international development issues in the mid-1960s while working as a Peace Corps community development worker in Ethiopia. After the Peace Corps, Brown worked during the summers, while a graduate student at Yale, as a Training Coordinator for community development and environmental studies for Ethiopia Peace Corps, Education Development Center in Newton, Massachusetts. He went on from there to teach organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University. In 1979 Brown became a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer for one year at the Public Enterprises Centre for Continuing Education in New Delhi, India. This experience, admits Brown, got him "re-hooked" on international development issues and the organizational problems of development organizations.

After his brief stint in India, Brown moved back to Massachusetts and in the early 1980s became the President of the Institute for Development Research (IDR) in Boston. At that time he also began teaching in the Organizational Behavior Department at the Boston University School of Management. He is currently a Professor and Chairman of this department, while maintaining his role at IDR.

As the President of IDR, Brown has been working on strengthening development NGOs and civil societies since the mid-1980s. Among other things, he has led numerous innovative IDR programs, including the Asian NGO Leadership Fellows Program, a "sabbatical experience of strategic thinking, sectoral planning and leadership development for more than 40 Chief Executives of key Asian NGOs." He has also carried out a series of studies on the strategy and organization development problems of NGOs, the relations among civil society organizations and government agencies, and the evolution of civil society alliances to affect national and international policy.

One of the trends that Brown has observed as a result of his studies has been the rise in power and number of civil society organizations. Brown says that transnational civil societies have experienced "incredible growth over the last decade or so" and are now considered to be powerful players in development activities in many countries. Creating strategies for strengthening civil society has been a consistent goal of Brown's. He has also focused on such issues as developing cooperative links among civil society, business and government institutions, improving partnerships between Northern and Southern NGOs, and monitoring grassroots participation in World Bank projects around the world. His recent book, The Struggle for Accountability: The World Bank, NGOs, and Grassroots Movements (MIT Press, Fall 1998), was co-authored with Professor Jonathan Fox at the University of California at Santa Cruz. It is the first comprehensive analysis of NGO efforts to make the World Bank more publicly accountable.

Brown earned a B.A. in Social Relations from Harvard University and a LL.B. and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Yale University. He will join the Hauser Center part-time in the summer and full-time in the fall of 1999.

-- Corinne Locke


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