Energy and Environment
My work on energy policy has been published in various venues.
In 2009 I published “Threads in the Canvas. Pipeline Politics and the Economization of the Russian Foreign Policy in the Black Sea Region", Journal of Asian and East European Studies, (vol. 1, no. 1, April 2009, pp. 25-40) and in 2010 I published the book The Energy Dimension in EU-Russia Relations with a major Romanian publisher.
Populist Radical Right Governments and Environmental Policy
Abstract: What are the consequences of electing populist leaders? This question is of continued importance as populist leaders challenge elections and impact politics across the world. While the consequences of populist electoral victories on democratic processes have been widely examined, other arenas are still being explored. The environmental policies of populist leaders are particularly important as climate change impacts increasing number of people on a global level. In this article I show how populist radical right (PRR) leaders respond to this global crisis by doubling down on economic nationalism and prioritizing national goals of development and claiming that fighting climate change is a Western imposition on domestic politics. I use a mixed methods approach that employs the most complete global data on populist leaders and their environmental stances as well as case studies in Europe and the developing world. This paper shows how populism doubles down on economic nationalism in the environmental arena.
The new politics of private investment in developing countries
with Erum Haider and Duncan Hobbs
My interest in the political economy of developing countries at the intersection with energy and environment has also resulted in a significant data project gathering the largest data base of public-private infrastructure projects. While the World Bank collects these projects, the data set does not record how much of a project is funded by domestic versus foreign investment—an important oversight considering the large literature on FDI, nor does the data code how much of the asset or project is still under state control. In work With Erum Haider we are now coding these project-level variables in a data set that has the potential to become a landmark in the discipline. we use this data in papers testing hypotheses on the impact of foreign ownership to project success and on the role of political involvement of state agents in privatized energy and utilities infrastructure across the developing world. We anticipate that the resulting data set will become a staple in future research.