Publications

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.

Former Roosevelt Institute senior research Sunny Malhotra and BESI Capitalism and Democracy affiliate Steve Vogel and analyze the American political economy past and present through the lens of predistribution.

In a November 2025 article for the journal Politics & Society, UC Berkeley Political Economy director and BESI steering committee member Steve Vogel argues that that economists should bring power into the heart of their analysis of wage formation.

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 September 2025 article for the journal Politics and Society, Isabella Mariani advocates for antitrust legislation that centers the autonomy of the user as part of a solution to the problems of the attention economy.

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 a July 2025 article for the journal Perspectives on Politics, political science Ph.D. student and BESI graduate student researcher Sarang Shah and Tufts political science professor Eitan Hersh report on the results of a survey of business leaders and the mass public. They find that while the public cares very little about corporate leader engagement, business leaders would like to see active engagement on issues from their firms, albeit from behind the scenes.

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.

Today’s critiques about geography in a world influenced by AI shadow debates from two decades ago, argues geographer and BESI Technology Network affiliate Clancy Wilmott in an article for the journal Dialogues in Human Geography. By returning to these debates, as well as critique by Black, queer, and Indigenous computing seen in other disciplines, geographers have the opportunity to deeply influence the future of computation via a situated, critical geographical thought and action.