Neva Goodwin


Neva Goodwin Rockefeller is co-director of the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University, where she is a research associate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and director of the Social Science Library: Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being.
Goodwin works towards a contextual economics theory that will have more relevance to contemporary real-world social and ecological concerns than does the dominant economic paradigm. To this end, Goodwin is the lead author of two introductory university-level economics textbooks as well as online teaching modules, along with editing two six-part series among other publications.
Goodwin is also involved with efforts to motivate business to recognize social and ecological health as significant, long-term corporate goals. She is involved in socially responsible investing and served in leadership roles at organizations such as, most recently, the New Economy Coalition, Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development, Ceres, and the Sustainable Endowments Institute.

Scholarship

Goodwin is active in a variety of attempts to systematize and institutionalize an economic theory – "contextual economics" – that will have more relevance to contemporary real-world social and ecological concerns than does the dominant economic paradigm, along with university-level curriculum for these approaches and results, and action and policy to implement these understandings. Her work ranges across climate change, labor relations, and feminist economics. She also seeks a deeper theoretic understanding from exposure to on-the-ground experiments in alternative socio-economic institutional design.
She is the lead author of two introductory college-level textbooks: Microeconomics in Context and Macroeconomics in Context, published by M.E. Sharpe and then Routledge. She is also the editor of two six-part book series: Evolving Values for a Capitalist World, and Frontier Thinking in Economic Thought.
She is currently on the editorial board of Schmollers Jahrbuch, Journal of Contextual Economics.
Goodwin's work has been published in various peer-reviewed journals and periodicals, including Real-World Economics Review, Our Planet: The Magazine of the United Nations Environment Programme, Forum for Social Economics, Growing the Economy through Global Warming Solutions, Opinion Sur, Online Encyclopedia of Ecological Economics, the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, Review of Radical Political Economics, Voprosy Ekonomiki , Ecological Economics, Green China Magazine, World Development, and The Harvard Business Review. Her work has also appeared in several edited compilations. GDAE also hosts several of her working papers.
Her work has been reviewed in the Review of Radical Political Economics, Management Revue, Journal of Economic IssuesInternational Labour Review, The Journal of Consumer Affairs, The Journal of Environment & Development, Southern Economic Journal, The Economic Journal.
She has lectured widely, including at the Club of Rome and The Smithsonian Institution Grand Challenges Consortia; MIT; Thirtieth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures; New School For Social Research; University of Utah; the Kennedy School of Government; the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; the Cambridge Forum; Environmental Grantmakers Association; the University of Moscow; the University of Cambridge; the EPA; the Russian Society for Ecological Economics; the American Economic Association; Socially Responsible Investing ; the American Association of Legal Scholars; the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics ; the Eastern Economics Association; the Atlantic International Economic Society; the International Society for Quality of Life Studies ; the Boston Theological Institute in conjunction with The American Association for the Advancement of Science; the UN Development Program; the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics; and the World Institute for International Development, Helsinki.
Goodwin has helped arrange a variety of conferences, seminars, and symposia at Pocantico Conference Center, Tufts University, Harvard University, Boston University and elsewhere, and with the support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Richard Lounsbery Foundation, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Center for International Development at Harvard University, Hewlett Foundation, and more.
Goodwin is also director of a project that has developed a "Social Science Library: Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being." Containing a bibliography of more than 9,000 titles, including full text PDFs of about a third of these, this material will be sent on USB drives or CDs to all university libraries in 137 developing countries.

Public activity

Goodwin is currently on the board of advisors at Sustainable Endowments Institute; and the president of the Mount Desert Land and Garden Preserve.
Goodwin has previously worked with the Institute for New Economic Thinking ; Ceres ; College of the Atlantic; Bar Harbor, Maine ; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund ; the Human Development and Capability Association ; the International Society for Ecological Economics; Washington, D.C., President's Council on Sustainable Development; Task Force on Population & Consumption; U.S. Department of Commerce, Economic Development Administration; the Committee for the Political Economy of the Good Society ; the World Bank; the International Center for Research on Women, Washington, D.C. ; Technology + Economics consulting firm; the New Community Development Corporation, Department of Housing and Urban Development ; and the Boston Society of Architects.
Goodwin was also active in organizing her family to attempt to reason with the present and former CEOs of ExxonMobil regarding climate change, directly and through shareholder resolutions. The family had some success in persuading the company to reduce its public stance of ridiculing the science of climate change.

Early life and family

Goodwin attended the Chapin School in New York and graduated from Concord Academy, Class of 1962.
Goodwin received an A.B. in English literature; Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College, Class of 1966. Her senior thesis, "The Deciphered Heart: A Study of Conrad Aiken's Poetry and Prose Fiction," was published in full in the 75th Anniversary Year edition of the Sewanee Review the following summer, under the pen-name Jennifer Aldrich.
After working closely with Buckminster Fuller for seven years to establish and organize the Design Science Institute, and then for a couple of years as a consultant, she returned to academia to receive a MPA from Harvard Kennedy School and a Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University. Her dissertation, Back to the Fork: What We Have Derived from Marshallian Economics and what We Might Have Derived, became her first book in 1991: Social Economics: An Alternative Theory: Building Anew on Marshall's Principles . While a student at BU, she co-taught courses with S. M. Miller and Paul Streeten, and was a research associate and coordinator of the Global Issues Program at BU's World Development Institute, as well as the Director of Program Development at The African Studies Center.
Goodwin was also visiting fellow at the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University in Helsinki, and a research associate at the Instituto Interamericano De Cooperacion Para La Agricultura, Buenos, Aires, Argentina, before moving to Tufts University in 1991.
Goodwin is the widow of Bruce Mazlish and is the mother of two and grandmother of three. She is an avid photographer, especially of lichens.
Goodwin is a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller family. She is the third child of David Rockefeller and Margaret McGrath, along with siblings David, Abby, Peggy, Richard, and Eileen. "Goodwin" is originally her middle name, after an ancestor on her mother's side.

Selected Articles

NB: Most of these are also gathered on Goodwin's ResearchGate profile.