Titles

• Consultant, Satya Development International, LLC
• Founding Co-Director, Conservation Solutions Lab

Biography

Michael Brown is a natural resources management, community conservation, and sustainable agriculture specialist with more than 35 years of experience designing, implementing and evaluating multisectoral projects in more than 30 countries. His career has focused on community engagement across development sectors, particularly in landscape conservation and sustainable agriculture. He has worked on free prior and informed consent (FPIC) issues in conservation, social science integration in NRM, agricultural development programs and projects, and climate change projects. He led a USAID funded NGO capacity building project in NRM for seven years in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2013 he published a book on REDD+ offering suggestions on how REDD+ programming could be structured to become feasible. Geographically he has worked across social, political, and ecological settings from Sahelian and the Horn of Africa drylands to humid and montane forests in central Africa, Asia, the south Pacific, Caribbean and parts of Latin America. He founded and led an NGO for 10 years – Innovative Resources Management that worked on anti-corruption, sustainable agriculture, and community forest conservation in central Africa, Uganda, Madagascar, Haiti and Nepal. More recently he worked for over six years at Chemonics International as lead of the Environment and Natural Resources practice. During this time he co-initiated the Conservation Solutions Lab coalition of partners with Arizona State University, an evolving network committed to shared learning around community engagement in conservation that addresses land rights, community engagement, and biological parameters for conservation outcomes. Currently he has restarted a consultancy formed in 2008 called Satya Development International LLC, which is currently teaming with partners on a range of proposals in the NRM and sustainable agriculture space. He recently led an op-ed effort with other CSL members building on CSL work over the past few years.

Education

• MA, Cultural Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• BA, Literature and Third World Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst