Michael E. Conroy

Dr. Michael E. Conroy is Co-founder of Colibrí Consulting – Certification for Sustainable Development, a firm dedicated to the intersection of certification systems, corporate accountability, and global sustainable development. For the past twenty years he has been at the forefront of the movement to build systems that encourage and reward higher standards of corporate accountability in a wide range of industries. Building on a 25-year academic career as a Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin and later as a Senior Research Scholar and Senior Lecturer at Yale University, Dr. Conroy has taught, researched, and written about the “certification revolution” that has created unprecedented transformation of global corporate practices on social and environmental fronts over the past fifteen years. He has also spent a dozen years outside academia in the philanthropic world, first at the Ford Foundation (nine years) and then with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (three years), building new modes of corporate accountability through support for these same certification systems. Dr. Conroy serves as Board Chair of Equitable Origin, Inc., an NGO that has developed the only certification process for social and environmental accountability for all of the global energy development industry. He is also a member of the international board of directors of the Forest Stewardship Council, for whom he served as Board Chair from 2011 to 2014, and a UT Research Fellow associated with the Lozano-Long Institute for Latin American Studies.