In 1951, he joined the
British Colonial Service on recommendations from
Meyer Fortes and John Beattie. He was posted to
Tanganyika, but considered becoming a Catholic priest. While there, he rose to the position of district commissioner. He and his partner Riley left for
Southern Rhodesia in 1956, where they had found other positions. In 1963, he moved to the United States and joined the Institute of International Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley. At the same time, he lectured in education and sociology, and trained
Peace Corps volunteers. He joined the
University of California, Santa Barbara's Anthropology department in 1966. Riley eventually joined him there as a member of the Geography department and later as a lecturer in Environmental Studies. In 1968, he visited Ghanaian and Ugandan communities with
Charles J. Erasmus, their study supporting Brokensha's positive views of community development programmes. In the same year he chaired the university's Anthropology department, at a time when students protested over the decision not to rehire radical anti-grading and anti-capitalist archaeologist Bill Allen, as well as the
Vietnam War. Taking a leave of absence from the university in 1970, Brokensha travelled to Kenya for fifteen months to serve as an evaluator for the
Mbeere Special Rural Development Programme. It aimed to invest in infrastructure to improve income-generation. He was joined by Riley, and they worked together on two
National Science Foundation-funded projects concerning
ethnobotanical knowledge. They published a two-volume study in 1988 based on their experience titled
The Mbeere in Kenya. During the 1970s, Brokensha began advocating for the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in international development policy, working with
Thayer Scudder and
Michael M. Horowitz to form the Institute for Development Anthropology in 1976. He was appointed to UCSB's Environmental Studies Program in 1976, and later became its chair. In 1980, he received the university's top teaching award. Brokensha retired from academia in 1989, but continued his interest in Indigenous development. At his retirement, he was presented with a
Festschrift titled
Social Change & Applied Anthropology: Essays in Honor of David W. Brokensha. His last academic book was a 2012 co-edited work titled
Climate Change and Threatened Communities, and he co-authored his last article in 2015. In 2007, he published a memoir titled
Brokie’s Way: An Anthropologist’s Story. ==Personal life==