Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Policy

My research and teaching focus on global environmental politics, with a special interest in biodiversity conservation and environmental policy in developing countries. At the broadest level, I am interested in how different societies around the world respond to environmental problems. This is the subject of a new book, Comparative Environmental Politics, that I am co-editing with Stacy VanDeveer of the University of New Hampshire, to be published by MIT Press in 2009.

My previous book, Environmental Leadership in Developing Countries (MIT Press 2001), analyzes “why things sometimes go right” in tropical conservation – specifically, how Costa Rica and Bolivia emerged as conservation leaders, and the implications for theories of policy change in the developing world.  Other research interests include transnational social movements, social science research methods, environmental foreign policy, and institutional resilience. For an overview of what institutions are and why they matter for the environment, click here (requires Windows Media Player).