John R. Brown After more than four years as executive director of the New Mexico Water Dialogue, John has “retired” to consultant status. John’s entire working career has involved public policy – how it gets made, what the results are, how people can change it. He studied it in graduate school, worked in policy organizations for the federal government, the Navajo Nation, the State of New Mexico, Sandoval County, and – as a consultant – for several Indian tribes and other organizations. He has also taught about the policy process as a part time instructor at the University of New Mexico in the Public Administration program and the Political Science Department. In the mid 1990s, as a consultant to an environmental NGO in the Philippines and later for the New Mexico Acequia Association, he became increasingly aware of the major role of institutions – the rules, norms, and shared strategies that people develop and use to structure their interactions – in maintaining policy stability and shaping policy change. In 2000-01, as a visiting scholar in the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, he studied and wrote about these themes in relation to water planning and policy in New Mexico. 

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