Ben Cashore specialises in global and multi-level environmental governance, comparative public policy and administration, and transnational business regulation/corporate social responsibility. His substantive research interests include climate policy, biodiversity conservation/land use change, and sustainable environmental management of forests and related agricultural sectors. His geographic focus includes Southeast Asia, North America, Latin America and Europe.

Ben’s theoretical interests include the legitimacy and authority requirements of non-state market driven (NSMD) global governance, the influence of economic globalisation on domestic environmental policies, and the potential of anticipatory policy design for identifying path dependent policy mixes capable of ameliorating “super wicked” environmental problems.

Ben joined LKYSPP after spending 18 years at Yale University as a professor of environmental governance and political science, where he also directed the Governance, Environment and Markets (GEM) initiative and, from 2014-2019, directed the Yale International Fox Fellows exchange program which awards promising graduate students in 18 partner universities. Ben was born and raised in British Columbia, Canada. His PhD is from the University of Toronto and he undertook postdoctoral research at Harvard University and the University of British Columbia. He worked for three years in Ottawa, Canada as a policy advisor to the leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party.

Scholars and practitioners of environmental and sustainability policy are increasingly recognizing that despite important successes, some of the world’s most critical policy challenges are accelerating, highlighted by the climate crisis, oceans degradation, and species extinctions.

My research is designed to help generate strategic insights for those cases in which there is a gap between what policy officials seek to achieve and outcomes “on the ground.” To do this, I engage in three related research efforts.

First, I study the development of environmental policy tools within global, transnational, private and domestic arenas. This project devotes particular attention to the way in which policy making authority emerges, and the sources of durable, rather than temporary, environmental policy innovations. Second, I spend considerable time conceptualizing particularly vexing policy challenges. This emphasis has led me, along with Levin, Auld and Bernstein, to identify, and address, “super wicked” problems denoted by four key features: time is running out; no central authority; those seeking the solve the problem are also causing it; and irrational discounting. Third, and as a result, I devote theoretical and empirical attention to uncovering policy designs capable of uncovering “easy to pull, but hard to reverse” policy levers that may uncover innovative ways to assist governments in meeting their long-term goals.

My presentation will review the integration of this basic and applied research orientation to show how we not only provide graduate students with cutting edge skills to conduct rigorous research, but also how to make a practical contribution to helping ameliorate some of the world’s most pressing challenges.