The Unpopular View with Michael I. Brown
THEUNPOPULARVIEW
The Podcast challenging the Narrative dividing Boomers, Gen Z, and the Global South.
with Michael I. Brown
Latest Episode | Episode 21 | August 6, 2026
USAID Is Gone. What Should Replace It? | Emily Brearley (3/3)
THEUNPOPULARVIEW
The Podcast challenging the Narrative dividing Boomers, Gen Z, and the Global South.
with Michael I. Brown
Latest Episode | Episode 21 | August 6, 2026
USAID Is Gone. What Should Replace It? | Emily Brearley (3/3)
About the Podcast
Why does poverty persist after decades of aid? Why do development projects fail despite billions in funding? Why do policies designed to help communities often leave them worse off?
The Unpopular View tackles the questions most policymakers, activists, and institutions avoid. Host Michael Brown draws on more than 30 years of work across 35+ countries to examine the realities of foreign aid, climate policy, corruption, resource governance, and economic development.
Rather than repeating familiar narratives, each episode tests popular assumptions against evidence from the field. The result is a candid exploration of what drives progress, what holds it back, and why many global solutions fail to deliver on their promises.
If you're interested in geopolitics, development, economics, and the forces shaping the modern world, The Unpopular View offers a perspective you won't hear anywhere else.
Meet the Host
Michael I. Brown
40 years of experience in international development in diverse technical sectors in developing countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, South Pacific, South Asia, and the Caribbean. including natural resource management, community-based planning and decision making, community conservation, environmental compliance, strategic planning, NGO capacity building, conflict management, anti-corruption (and good governance), sustainable agriculture/livelihood and food security, pastoral production systems.
Episode List
Featured Reel
Latest episode
USAID Is Gone. What Should Replace It? | Emily Brearley (3/3)
USAID has been dismantled. The World Bank's own evaluations keep finding what its projects don't achieve.
USAID has been dismantled. The World Bank's own evaluations keep finding what its projects don't achieve. So the question is no longer whether the aid architecture is broken — it's whether anything should replace it.
In the final segment of my three-part conversation with Dr. Emily Brearley — development economist, 25 years at the World Bank and other international institutions, and author of Aid Inferno: How to Reduce Poverty, Combat Global Warming, and Be a Good Person — we each put a blueprint on the table.
We agree on some fundamantal issues and disagree on some important details.
Emily's answer is what she calls Solution 42: sharply narrow what institutions like the World Bank attempt. Stick to the sectors they demonstrably do well. Build in transparency and citizen involvement in project selection and evaluation. Fund a small number of high-impact projects chosen by people in recipient countries themselves. It rhymes with Esther Duflo's evidence-first approach.
We also agree that a social contract is a fundamental missing piece — clear goals, trade-offs and obligations that people on the ground can actually hold institutions to that are negotiated. In 40+ years of fieldwork I never saw one written, and neither USAID nor the World Bank has ever framed a project in those terms. Emily agrees that's a major gap.
Where we diverge somewhat is on who does the work. Should nationals do everything, or is there a place for foreigners with unique capacity building contributions to make?
ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Emily Brearley is a development economist and former World Bank economist with ~25 years across the World Bank and other international institutions, leading programs in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Aid Inferno is a case-study-driven critique built on World Bank evaluation data arguing that development finance rewards spending and institutional survival over outcomes and accountability.
ABOUT THE SHOW The Unpopular View is for the exhausted middle — evidence over outrage, and criticism that doesn't spare either orthodoxy. Hosted by Michael Brown, international development consultant and author of Redeeming REDD (Routledge, 2013) and Climate Mitigation in the Land Sector of the Global South (Routledge, 2026).
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