Bromley graduated fromUtah State University in 1963 with a degree inEcology. He then received an M.S. (1967) and PhD (1969) in natural resource economics fromOregon State University, where his major professor was Emery Castle.[who?]
Bromley began working as a professor at theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969 and retired after 40 years. He served two terms as chair of the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics in theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. In 2014 he publishedWisconsin Becoming: The Careful Creation of Prosperity, which covers the history of the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics and its relation to economic development in the state of Wisconsin.
In 2016, Juha Hiedanpää and Bromley published Environmental Heresies: The Quest for Reasonable, which reframes environmental conflicts and which advances a pragmatic, deliberative approach.
Bromley has been the editor of the journalLand Economics for more than 41 years. His scholarship has been concerned with more effectivefisheries,economic development, and environmental policy. In an influential article, "The ideology of efficiency: Searching for a Theory of Policy Analysis", Bromley challenged conventional notions that economic efficiency analysis is "objective", finding an absence of consistency and coherence in thelogical positivism of economic welfare analysis.[5][6]
Sufficient Reason: Volitional Pragmatism and the Meaning of Economic Institutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.[14]
Vulnerable People, Vulnerable States: Redefining the Development Challenge. London: Routledge, 2012. (with Glen Anderson)[15]
Institutions and the Environment. (ed.) Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2014.[16]
Environmental Heresies: The Quest for Reasonable. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. (with Juha Hiedanpää)[17]
Possessive Individualism: A Crisis of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.[18]
Assuring the Future of South Sudan: Coherent Governance and Sustainable Livelihoods. Africa World Books, 2020. (with Lual A. Deng, Santiono Ayuel Longar, Bishop (Emeritus) Enock Tombe Stephen)[19]
"The Village Against the Center: Resource Depletion in South Asia".American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 66(5):868–873 (1984). (with Devendra P. Chapagain).
"Property Relations and Economic Development: The Other Land Reform".World Development, 17(6):867-77 (June 1989).
"Private Property Rights and Presumptive Policy Entitlements: Reconsidering the Premises of Rural Policy".European Review of Agricultural Economics, 17:197–214 (Spring 1990). (with Ian Hodge)
"Property Rights, Externalities, and Resource Degradation: Locating the Tragedy,"Journal of Development Economics, 33(2): 235–62, 1990. (with Bruce Larson)
"The Ideology of Efficiency: Searching for a Theory of Policy Analysis".Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 19(1):86–107 (July 1990).
"Indigenous Land Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa: Appropriation, Security and Investment Demand".World Development, 25(4):549-62 (1997). (with Espen Sjaastad)
"Constitutional Political Economy: Property Claims in a Dynamic World".Contemporary Economic Policy, 15(4):43–54 (October 1997).
"Modeling Population and Resource Scarcity in 14th Century England".Journal of Agricultural Economics, 56(2):217-37 (2005). (with Jean-Paul Chavas).
"Resource Degradation in the African Commons: Accounting for Institutional Decay".Environment and Development Economics, 13(5):539-63, 2008.
"Formalising Property Relations in the Developing World: The Wrong Prescription for the Wrong Malady".Land Use Policy, 26(1):20–27 (2009).
"Abdicating Responsibility: The Deceits of Fisheries Policy".Fisheries, 34(6):280-90 (2009).
"Volitional Pragmatism: The Collective Construction of Rules to Live By".The Pluralist, 10(1):6–23 (2015).
"Where is the Backward Russian peasant? Evidence against the superiority of private farming, 1883–1913".Journal of Peasant Studies, 42(2):425-47 (2015) (with Michael Kopsidis and Katja Bruisch).
"The French Revolution and German Industrialization: Dubious Models and Doubtful Causality".Journal of Institutional Economics, 12(1):161–190 (2016). (with Michael Kopsidis).
"Institutional Economics".Journal of Economic Issues, 50(2, June):309-325 (2016).
"Rights-Based Fisheries and Contested Claims of Ownership: Some Necessary Clarifications".Marine Policy, 72(October):231–236 (2016).
"Rationality and Fatalism: Meanings and Labels in Pre-Revolutionary Russia".Mind and Society, 20:103-05 (2021).
"Opening Up is Not Showing Up: Human Volition after the Pandemic".Mind and Society, 20(2):195-99 (2021).
"The Confusions of Democracy: The Arab Spring and Beyond".World Development, 158(October) (2022).
