Julie McCarthy

Julie McCarthy is a nonresident fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development, housed within the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. She is the managing director of Nature Finance, a global nonprofit organization that works to make financial markets and economic policies more nature-positive and equitable. She has 20 years of nonprofit and philanthropic leadership experience in the areas of economic justice and financial governance.

Most recently, McCarthy was senior advisor to the chair of the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, where she supported global advocacy, research and engagement to promote more equitable, accountable, and effective economic policies for health and well-being.

Prior to that, she was the founding co-director of the Open Society Foundations’ (OSF) Economic Justice Program, a $100 million per annum global grantmaking and impact investment program focused on issues of fiscal justice, workers’ rights, and corporate power. In 2021, she led OSF’s $11 million global advocacy campaign on debt and financing economic recovery in low- and middle-income countries. Before this, she founded and led the Open Society Foundation’s Fiscal Governance Program. From 2011 to 2012, she served as the founding director of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), after having worked with the Obama White House and Brazilian government to develop and launch OGP as a senior adviser at the Transparency and Accountability Initiative.

In 2009, McCarthy was selected as a Franklin Fellow and peacebuilding adviser at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where she helped scope and launch a $30 million peacebuilding program in Liberia. Prior to this, McCarthy directed the Open Society Foundations’ Revenue Watch Program and then co-founded the Natural Resource Governance Institute, serving as its deputy director until 2009. She is an Aspen/ADL Civil Society Fellow.

McCarthy holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a master’s from Yale University.