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BESI senior researcher Samuel Trachtman shares his top three takeaways from a recent panel discussion featuring California political scholars and practitioners.

Motivated by recent major governance problems and policy implementation failures in California, BESI assembled an expert panel of scholars and practitioners to explore the underlying causes of the disfunction and examine potential remedies.

In this talk, recorded at BESI on October 30, 2025, economist Cecilia Rikap explore possibilities and strategies for expanding digital sovereignty and putting technology at the service of people and the planet.

On October 27, 2025, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Edward Alden visited BESI to share insights from his latest book, "When the World Closed Its Doors: The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Borders."

In this talk recorded at BESI on October 21, sociologist Philipp Brandt shows how data scientists in the 2010s not only transformed familiar ideas into a new professional, but — for better or for worse — also devised the technical machinery for seeing the world through datasets.

On November 13, BESI convened 26 experts on California politics and policy to discuss how to make California more affordable.

In this talk, recorded at BESI on September 30, 2025, Cambridge researcher Luke Kemp explores the ways explore the ways growth-obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, Big Tech, and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species

In a September 2025 article for the journal Politics and Society, Isabella Mariani argues that enhancing competition may not be sufficient for regulating the attention economy — and may even exacerbate its harms.

In this second event in our series on democratic backsliding in the U.S., panelists from across the UC Berkeley campus touched on the weakening of Congress, Trump and the courts, the pressures on civic institutions, and the possible dynamics and implications of popular protest, among other urgent topics.

For he majority of its history, decarbonization policy focused on distributing the burden of climate change mitigation. Recently, however, decarbonization has a competitive turn, BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling observes in a new article for Nature.

In a recent article for the BiGS Actionable Intelligence, the blog for the Institute for Business in a Global Society (BiGS) at Harvard Business School, BESI Climate research lead Jonas Meckling observes that with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the U.S. is taking "significant steps back” on clean energy.

BESI associate director Amanda Behm reports from Paris on a timely workshop co-organized by BESI.