Neva Goodwin
Neva Goodwin seeks ways to translate an understanding of the economy in its full social and ecological contexts into action and policy. She follows on-the-ground experiments in alternative socio-economic institutional design, and is involved with efforts to motivate business to recognize social and ecological health as significant, long-term corporate goals. Her lifelong involvement with the care and management of natural environments, and awareness of the onrushing crises of the 21st century – environmental crises causing, and caused by, social and economic disfunction – have turned her attention from economics per se to the possibility for ecological restoration to halt and turn around humanity’s headlong slide to disaster.
From 1995 through 2019 Dr. Goodwin was Co-director of the Global Development And Environment Institute, a research university at Tufts University. There she worked to systematize and institutionalize an economic theory – “contextual economics” – that will have more relevance to contemporary real-world concerns than does the dominant economic paradigm. Much of this work has now moved to the Economics In Context Initiative at Boston University (http://www.bu.edu/eci/). Goodwin’s work in economics included editing more than a dozen books, and she is the lead author of three introductory textbooks: Microeconomics in Context, Macroeconomics in Context and Principles of Economics in Context. A Transitional Economies Edition of the micro text was translated into Russian and Vietnamese, and a European edition of the macro text has been published.