Journal Articles

A journal article for Nature Communications by UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Ph.D. student Taryn Fransen and BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling provides an empirical account of the strategic objectives of emissions reduction pledges via interviews with 40 policymakers. They find that the main purpose of emissions reduction pledges is to influence international actors, not enact domestic preferences.

In an article for the journal Nature Communications, BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling and UC Berkeley Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Ph.D. candidate Em Finkelstine introduce a dataset of 122 institutions that promote cleantech commercialization.

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.

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 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.

BESI climate affiliate Meg Mills-Novoa and Boise State human-environment geographer Sophia Borgias human-environment geographer conduct a systematic review of peer-reviewed articles and atlas profiles to understand the nature of contest hydropower development and the dynamics of social resistance. They find that in most cases, contested projects were backed by multiple types of funders, with a notable shift toward public-private and bilateral finance.

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.