My current research focuses on the political economy of power sector procurement, resource nationalism, and extractive industry. I am interested in why political elites (and their patrons) sometimes perceive the energy transition as a threat and at other times as an opportunity.
Dissertation Project
“Selecting for Solar: Energy Planning, Elite Strategy, and Distributive Politics”
Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, many low-carbon power generation technologies (wind, solar, geothermal) became economically feasible at scale for low and middle-income countries, yet, only some governments chose to exploit this opportunity. My ongoing dissertation research, which will result in three papers and eventually a book manuscript, seeks to explain such variation in the context of so-called “patronage democracies” and competitive authoritarian regimes. Using a combination of formal theory, survey experiments, administrative data, and elite interviews, I analyze the conditions under which incumbent governments have incentives to plan for renewable energy. Empirically, the focus is on India and Indonesia (plus six additional shadow cases), using data gathered from nearly a year of fieldwork in both countries.
Paper #1: “Low Carbon for the Short Term? Political Time Horizons and Incentives for Energy Transition.”
Paper #2: “Resource Nationalism and Climate Attitudes in Indonesia.”
Paper #3: “What Do We Learn from Backlash? Agenda Control and Bargaining Over Decarbonization.”
Book Project:
Against the Current: Energy Transitions, Patronage, and Market Reforms in South and Southeast Asia.
Peer-Reviewed Article
“National Models of Climate Governance,” with Esther Shears and Jonas Meckling. Published in Nature Climate Change, 2023.
National climate institutions structure the process of climate mitigation policymaking and shape climate policy ambition and performance. Countries have, for example, been building science bodies, passing climate laws, and creating new agencies. Here, we provide the first systematic comparison of climate institutions across twenty-one of the largest emitters. Drawing on an original dataset, we identify in a bottom-up cluster analysis four national models of climate governance—Climate Technocracies, Climate Developmentalists, Carbon Fragmentists, and Carbon Centralists. These national models of climate governance are associated with policy ambition and performance. Climate Technocracies and Developmentalists tend to score higher than Carbon Fragmentists and Centralists in policy ambition and performance. The relative ambition of national models of governance is associated with some macro-institutional and macro-economic features, but not others. This suggests potential for domestic and international policymakers to invest in building national climate institutions across country settings to strengthen climate policy capacity.
Working Paper
“When the River Runs Dry: Hydropower Stress and the Energy Transition,” with Anthony Calacino, Aaditee Kudrimoti, and Ishana Ratan.
Do energy shocks catalyze energy transitions? Existing work suggests energy supply shocks promote renewable energy development by disrupting entrenched interests and drawing the long-term viability of existing energy sources into question. This article examines such claims in the context of an often-overlooked energy source: Hydropower. Increasingly frequent droughts lead to electricity crises in hydropower-dependent countries, plausibly motivating governments to seek alternatives. We propose and deploy a novel measure of such climate-induced energy supply shocks, which we term hydrostress, leveraging fine-grained global hydrological data. Our findings indicate severe hydrostress motivates governments to shift policymaking towards renewable energy. However, hydrostress has no detectable effect on buildout. We develop and test three mechanisms for this apparent divergence: State capacity, voter behavior, and interest group capture. Large-N tests and survey experiments reveal nuanced evidence in support of the state capacity and voter behavior explanations, while evidence from coordinated fieldwork in Brazil, Colombia, Nepal, and Laos points to the roles of sector-specific state capacity and interest group capture. The findings have important implications for our understanding of the energy transition.
Working Paper
“Does Democracy FiT? The Distributive Politics of Renewable Energy Reconsidered,” with Ishana Ratan
Feed-in Tariff (FiT) policies have catalyzed the majority of global renewable energy deployment, raising questions about the political causes of their enactment and implementation. We revisit the prominent hypothesis that democracy results in feed-in tariff adoption using a novel dataset which includes more and better data than previous studies. Contrary to existing literature, we find that the relationship between democracy and FiT adoption only holds within rich countries. Leveraging data on electoral institutions, regime support groups, and solar projects, we show that this is likely due to the fact that FiTs do not consistently produce the distributional implications predicted by the democratic hypothesis. Rather, second-order features of FiT design yield patterns which conform to prevailing and diverse domestic political economies. Drawing upon elite interviews in Vietnam, Malaysia, and India, we argue FiT adoption has less to do with regime type than the willingness of incumbents to trade-off fiscal discipline for enhanced targeting of rents and certainty of adequate supply.
In Progress
“Cabinet Minister Selection and Environmental Policymaking,” with Bill Kakenmaster.
“Do Voters Reward Incumbents for Successful Disaster Preparation? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in India," with Jennifer Bussell.
“The Consequences of Electricity Patronage for Energy Transition: Evidence from India.”