Robin Broad is Professor of International Development at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. She has done extensive on-the-ground research and policy work on mining and development in El Salvador and the Philippines, and works closely (through the global coalition International Allies, which she cofounded) with civil society groups in those countries and elsewhere around mining bans and environmentally, socially and economically responsible mining policy. For this work, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
She is the author or co-author of numerous publications on sustainable development, natural resources and mining. Her most recent book, coauthored with John Cavanagh, The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed, chronicles how El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban metals mining to save its watersheds while defeating an investor-state challenge. The book is available in cloth and paperback from Beacon/Penguin Random House, in the Philippines via Ateneo de Manila University Press, and in a Spanish-language edition (Grano de Sal, 2022). The Water Defenders was the 2021 winner of Duke University’s Juan Mendez Human Rights Award and was named as a best book of 2021 by Foreign Affairs and by the Progressive. Her prior books include Development Redefined: How the Market Met its Match and Global Backlash: Citizen Initiatives for a Just World Economy.
Dr. Broad worked as an international economist in the U.S. Treasury Department, with then-Congressman Charles Schumer, and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received her PhD and MPA from Princeton University’s then-Woodrow Wilson School and her BA (in economics & ecology) from Williams College. She joined Earthworks’ Board in 2015.