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John McArthur

Director & Senior Fellow., Brookings Center for Sustainable Development

  • John W. McArthur is senior fellow and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution.
  • He co-founded and co-chairs the 17 Rooms initiative, a new approach to catalyzing action for the Sustainable Development Goals.
  • He is also a senior adviser to the United Nations Foundation and a board governor for the International Development Research Centre.
  • He serves as a member of the UNICEF Advisory Group and of Policy Horizons Canada’s Deputy Minister Steering Committee. He was previously the chief executive officer of Millennium Promise Alliance, the international nongovernmental organization.
  • Prior to that he served as manager and then deputy director of the U.N. Millennium Project, Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s independent advisory body mandated to recommend an action plan for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. McArthur grew up in Vancouver and is a Canadian citizen.
  • He completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) at the University of British Columbia; a Master’s in Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government; and then an M.Phil. and D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in economics at Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar.