The Duck of Minerva

"Frack Wall Street, Not Our Water" "The People Are Rising, No More Compromising" "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Fossil Fuels Have to Go" It's Earth Day, and I am in Zucotti Park holding some parsley given to me by an unknown activist, chanting "oceans are rising, no more compromising!" with about 200 other people. It's the beginning of Global Climate Convergence, and I decided to do some field research on the status of the grassroots climate movement. We started in the park, did a little tour of Wall Street and other notable locations, such as the office of the New York State Comptroller. We then returned...

For me, yesterday's main activity was a home game workshop on the policy implications of research on climate policy. I co-organized the workshop with Alex Ovodenko and Scott Barrett, both of whom are active in the climate policy research community. We had a group of about 30 people, both academics and practitioners. The six presentations focused on climate negotiations, carbon clubs,  and carbon markets. Why such a workshop? As some of you may have noticed, one of my frustrations has been the disconnect between climate policy research and practice. While the fieldwork that I do on renewable...

This Saturday's highlight was the screening of the film Powerless at the Environmental Film Festival at Yale, where I was honored with the opportunity to participate in a panel on the film. Begin with the trailer, and then go see the entire film. It's excellent. The film depicts the desperate situation of the Kanpur Electricity Supply Company (KESCO) in Uttar Pradesh, India. Due to widespread electricity theft, the company incurs heavy losses and is unable to invest in power generation capacity to deal with daily power cuts. The urban poor refuse to pay their bills because of low incomes and...

One of the consequences of the ISA 2014 conference here in Toronto is that my extended blogging hiatus is coming to an end. Thanks to some experimental research in India, I haven't had a lot of time to share my thoughts in the past few months. In fact, I haven't had too many thoughts during this period either. However, now I have one. On Wednesday, I was honored to participate in a roundtable on climate policy organized by Detlef Sprinz from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. My participation notwithstanding, the roundtable featured a great group of scholars: Detlef, Robert...

The subfield of international relations seems to suffer from an inferiority complex. While most subfields of political science do their research and trust that the results are relevant to policy for a good reason, many an international relations scholar complains that the subfield is not relevant enough. The latest example is Campbell and Desch, who worry that rankings of departments are biased against policy relevance in international relations scholarship. Not surprisingly, Stephen Walt chose the bandwagoning strategy in this case (gated content, sorry). While I don't worry about rankings...

Just a week ago, NPR's Planet Money reported: "The government of Ecuador has abandoned a plan that would have kept part of the Amazonian rainforest off limits to oil drilling. The initiative was an unusual one: Ecuador was promising to keep the oil in the ground, but it wanted to be paid for doing so." The deal was offered to the world by President Rafael Correa in 2007. Ecuador would leave oil under the Yasuni National Park, a biodiversity hotspot, in exchange for a payment of 3.6 billion US dollars. The country offered to save a global public good -- biodiversity is not only cute, but also...