Research

My primary research and the subject of my dissertation traces the development of Los Angeles’s climate decarbonization and sustainability policies. Through two years of embedded ethnography within the Los Angeles Office of Energy and Sustainability, as well as with climate movements on the ground, I analyze how climate planning is institutionalized, negotiated, and stabilized, and how “best practice” models travel outward from Los Angeles to shape global urban climate agendas. By centering the organizational and bureaucratic practices of climate planners, as well as social movement mobilization in response, I investigate how planners translate global climate targets into local administrative routines, budgeting and implementation, and modes of longevity.

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Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the UNFCCC, my research examines the institutional design debates within the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee and the resistance articulated by social movements, Indigenous peoples, and state actors in the Global South. Drawing on extensive UNFCCC archival materials and institutional ethnography within the UNFCCC Secretariat and COP sessions, I analyze how power asymmetries, procedural rules, geographical norms, and knowledge infrastructures stabilized the Framework Convention and marginalized alternative proposals for more accountable legal frameworks, shaping the architecture of governance that persists today.

Another series of projects examines climate policy in conflict zones as tools of territorial control. I use Palestine/Israel as a case to show how ostensibly depoliticized, technoscientific climate planning, such as UNDP adaptation strategies, operates within the power asymmetries of occupation and state-building. I argue that UNFCCC institutional measures, particularly since the Paris Agreement, construct a sanitized, ostensibly “even” playing field while sidestepping profound developmental and political inequalities.