From 1995 to 2020 Dr. Neva Goodwin was Co-director of the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University, where she worked to systematize and institutionalize an economic theory – “economics in context” – that will have more relevance to real-world concerns than does the dominant economic paradigm. She has edited more than a dozen books, including the six-volume project, Frontier Issues in Economic Thought, and a Michigan Press series, Evolving Values for a Capitalist World. She is the lead author of four introductory textbooks published by Routledge: Microeconomics in Context, Macroeconomics in Context, Principles of Economics in Context and Essentials of Economics in Context. Translations of the Micro texts have included Russian, Vietnamese and Italian, and there is a European edition of the Macro text. At Tufts Goodwin led the development of an electronic “social science library” called “Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being,” which contains a bibliography of nearly 10,000 titles in seven social sciences. A version on CD-ROM and USB drives which included the full text of about a third of the titles, as well as the full bibliography, was sent to large numbers of university libraries in over 100 developing countries.
Dr. Goodwin has been involved with a variety of efforts to motivate businesses to recognize social and ecological health as significant, long-term corporate goals. She has served on numerous boards, including Ceres and Winrock International Institute For Agricultural Development, and was co-chair of the board of the New Economics Institute. In these roles, and in other activities outside of her academic work, Goodwin seeks a deeper theoretic understanding from exposure to on-the-ground experiments in alternative socio-economic institutional design. In recent years, pursuing her environmental interests, she has helped to found the Ecological Health Network (www.EcoHealthGlobal.org), an organization dedicated to increasing the amount and effectiveness of ecological restoration activities worldwide.
