Climate and Green Industrial Strategy

In this monograph, BESI faculty affiliate David J. Vogel and CUNY political scientist Roger Karapin offer an original analysis of the federal government’s sectoral climate policy accomplishments over the last five decades with concrete recommendations for policy makers.

Historians Robyn d’Avignon (NYU) and Matthew Shutzer (UC Berkeley) coordinated the Forum section for a volume of the journal Environmental History, in which novel archival sources and approaches take center stage. Situated in case studies in Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific, and the United States, the essays call attention to how underutilized archival knowledge has begun to reframe environmental historians’ approach to subterranean histories.

In a paper for the May 2026 issue of the journal Energy Policy, BESI climate fellow Kathryn Chelminski and her co-authors Guixing Wei and Gian Pietro Bellocca investigate how utility governance structure affects electrical grid reliability in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities.

In a chapter for ‘Organizations and Climate Change,’ Volume 102 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations, BESI steering committee member Neil Fligstein and DE student Janna Huang trace the emergence and trajectory of NGOs and financial institutions that advance corporate accountability ability for greenhouse gas emissions.

Many countries assume that leading with subsidies (“carrots”) reduces the need for punitive policies (“sticks”) to achieve decarbonization goals. In this paper for Nature, co-authored by BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling, the authors use an economic model that allows them to compare carrot- and stick-first policy decisions, finding that a carrot-first strategy still requires similar-sized sticks to a stick-first approach to achieve comparable levels of decarbonization.

In an article for the December 2024 volume of the journal Energy Policy, BESI Climate research lead Jonas Meckling and visiting scholar Nicholas Goedeking highlight the limits of business-led coordination.

In this article, published in Nature, BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling gives an account of a major shift in global decarbonization politics — from international cooperation on the costs of climate change mitigation to competition for the benefits of clean technologies.

In a new article for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, environmental historian Matthew Shutzer traces how images of extractive technologies have shifted from thematizing social questions about labor and industrial capitalism to serving as representations of the ecological crises of the present.

In this article for the journal Political Philosophy, BESI climate affiliate Anna Stilz argues that to make climate governance legitimate and compatible with collective self-determination, future legislation should be voted on and authorized by a global assembly and enforced via carbon tariffs applied by cooperating states.

In the rush to meet net-zero emissions targets, delays in connecting new, clean electricity generators are a major obstacle. One culprit of these delays is ineffective policy. Why do some states manage to overcome political barriers to interconnection? This case study, authored by energy policy research and BESI Climate affiliate Kathryn Chelminski, compares the utility interconnection regimes in New York and Massachusetts to find out.

In a new pre-print published published by the American Political Science Association, BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling investigates how an economy’s exposure to “impatient capital” predicts the amount of opposition policymakers will face to decarbonization policy.

This article, authored by BESI faculty affiliate Neil Fligstein and Berkeley Sociology graduate student Janna Z. Huang and published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews, examines and compares the various strategies employed by key segments of this finance industry to foster a more sustainable economy.

In a study published in the American Journal of Political Science, BESI Climate participating faculty member Amanda Clayton and her co-authors investigate how women’s representation affects climate deliberations, using community-managed forests in Malawi as a test case.

In their paper for the journal Energy Policy, BESI senior researcher Sam Trachtman, DE student Irem Inal, and climate research lead Jonas Meckling find that the political landscape is ripe for ambitious decarbonization policy.

In a new analysis published in Nature Energy, BESI Climate research lead Jonas Meckling and his co-authors find that central bank climate risk management may be responsive to political demands.

Economic sociologist and BESI faculty affiliate Neil Fligstein argues we need new approaches that center on mechanisms of economic and political innovation and change to understand how and if the energy transition will happen.

Why are some governments more effective in promoting economic change than others? In a new paper for The Journal of Politics, BESI Climate research lead Jonas Meckling and his-co-authors hypothesize that institutions can facilitate economic transformation through two primary mechanisms: insulation and compensation.

In their new paper for Nature Communications, BESI Climate research lead Jonas Meckling and Designated Emphasis in Political Economy student Ari Benkler take stock of different approaches to climate policymaking.