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.