Publications

BESI senior researcher Sam Trachtman discusses recent policy progress in California on affordability and proposes several areas of continued policy reform as well as upstream institutional and strategic measures that can promote durable growth-promoting policy despite the difficult political challenges.

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.

This project revisits the net neutrality debate in light of contemporary technological realities. Distributed caching infrastructure is no longer incidental; it is functionally necessary for high-performance internet service. The authors propose democratizing caching by requiring that first-hop ISPs offer standardized caching services as a component of baseline broadband access.

This project looks at how AI is being developed and adopted within religious organizations. This is a project that spans disciplinary boundaries, bringing digital sociology and the sociology of culture into conversation with theology and religious studies.

An increasingly important and overlooked dimension of digital content quality for kids is the level of visual stimulation. This project uses computer vision to quantify these overstimulating visual features that are linked to adverse cognitive and behavioral outcomes.

California is less affordable and poorer than it should be given the strength of our economy. In Part 1 of our white paper series on making California more affordable, BESI researcher Sam Trachtman lays out the basics facts, including that California has the nation’s highest poverty rate when accounting for cost of living.

Read BESI director Paul Pierson’s introduction to our three-part white paper series on solving California’s affordability problem.

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.