Stephen Brooks is a Senior Research Fellow at the Success Lab, where he works as a practitioner–scholar at the intersection of land rights, environmental governance, and sustainable development. He brings more than 20 years of experience leading multi-country programs and a global portfolio on land and resource governance at USAID, where his teams helped secure land rights for hundreds of thousands of people and linked tenure security to climate, agriculture, and critical minerals investments.
At the Success Lab, Mr. Brooks focuses on developing practical frameworks and indicators that help environmental managers, donors, and community organizations understand whether land, mineral, and agrifood investments are likely to deliver equitable and climate-resilient outcomes. His current work synthesizes lessons from initiatives in Latin America, Africa, and Asia to create usable decision tools that bridge the gap between high-level policy commitments and on-the-ground practice.
Mr. Brooks’ earlier fieldwork in Indonesia and Thailand examined customary land rights, mangrove restoration, and post-conflict and post-disaster land use, grounding his policy leadership in community-based resource governance and legal pluralism. Across these roles, he is interested in how land and resource systems can be governed in ways that center community authority while still engaging public institutions, markets, and investors in support of long-term social and ecological resilience.