
Macekura is a scholar of U.S. and international history, with a particular focus on political economy, international development, U.S. foreign relations, and environmentalism. His first book is “Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global ‘Sustainable Development’ in the Twentieth Century,” was published by Cambridge University Press. It analyzes how environmental NGOs struggled to implement environmental protection measures in the developing world in the 1950s and 1960s and then critiqued and reformed the development policies of the U.S. government, World Bank, and UN system in the 1970s and 1980s. His latest book explores various critiques of economic growth across the twentieth-century world by revealing how reformers have challenged and sought to rethink the ways in which the concept of “growth” has been defined, assessed, and measured. Titled The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and its Critics, the book was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. Macekura has had published articles and essays in edited volumes, periodicals, and scholarly journals on topics such as U.S. foreign policy, the origins of international development, and environmental policy and politics.