The Unpopular View with Michael Brown

Are foreign aid, climate policy, and global governance actually working — or are they propping up a broken system? The Unpopular View cuts through partisan noise with evidence-based analysis on the politics and economics of international development, foreign aid reform, climate policy, natural resource governance, and global corruption.Host Michael Brown is a social and environmental risk analyst and former NGO founder with three decades of field experience across more than 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. He has worked on corruption investigations, community-led development, conservation, mining governance, and climate mitigation — on the ground, not from a think tank.Each episode combines first-hand field stories with hard data to challenge policy myths from both left and right. Topics include USAID and foreign aid accountability, the Washington consensus, resource extraction in the Global South, Africa's demographic and economic future, climate finan