Colin I. Bradford

Colin Bradford is a nonresident senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings. He is an international economist who has specialized in global governance, the G20, and global economic policy issues.

He has edited “Global Leadership in Transition” (2010) and “Global Governance Reform” (2007), and contributed to “The G20 Summit at Five” (2014) and Brookings Press books based on conferences in Seoul, Washington, and Canberra that he helped organize.

In his first year at Brookings in 2004, Bradford became the first person to push for transforming the G8 to G20 at leaders level and a leading convener of meetings of influential professionals to work for international institutional reforms to bring the emerging market economies more fully into the global system. As a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Brookings, he helped create the think tank engagement track now known as the Think20 (T20) for G20 summits. He helped host governments organize G20 summits in the U.K., Canada, Korea, France, Mexico, Australia, China, Germany, and Argentina from 2009 through 2018.

In 2016, Bradford worked with China to highlight the importance of the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the China G20 Summit. During the China G20 year, he wrote the book “Global Leadership for Achieving Systemic Sustainability,” which was published subsequently by the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) and dealt with blending binaries and finding complementarities between Eastern and Western cultures.

As a co-chair of VISION20 (V20) since 2016, Bradford convened annual events with Brookings to encourage longer-term strategic thinking for the future. In 2018, he was a member of the T20 Advisory Board for the Argentine G20 Summit. He has also participated in Global Solutions Summits (GSS) in Berlin since 2017 and is a Global Solutions Initiative Global Fellow.

Bradford was a political appointee in the Carter and Clinton administrations for six years and served on the staff of the United States Senate for four years.

As a development economist, Bradford was a leading voice in pushing for integration of social impacts into economic policy in the early 1990s, when he brought together the OECD, the Inter-American Development Bank and the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America in several conferences and books forging new paths forward. While he was representing the U.S. in development cooperation coordination, he was a pivotal figure in developing the first set of global goals at the OECD Development Assistance Committee in 1995. In the early 2000s as a consultant at the World Bank, he forced the transition from divergent approaches to a single set of goals, targets, and indicators for 2015, now known as the Millennium Development Goals.

Bradford taught international and development economics at Yale University for 10 years and at American University for six years, and was an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS).