Authors
J. Timmons Roberts
Director, Center for Environmental Studies and Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies:
Sociology and Environmental Studies
Phone: (401) 863-3449
J_Timmons_Roberts(at)brown.edu
J. Timmons Roberts is Director of the Center for Environmental Studies and Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies. He taught at the College of William and Mary and directed its Program in Environmental Science and Policy (2001-2009), and he held a joint appointment in Latin American Studies and Sociology and co-directed the Environmental Studies program at Tulane University (1991-2001).
Currently, Professor Roberts focuses on international climate justice, climate finance, and policy. Through various projects and research analyses, he works on broad questiosn of how development needs to be rethought in the face of climate change. (Projects include documenting how foreign aid from the Global North to Global South is being transformed by the green energy/climate adaptation, in addition to analyzing Latin America’s emerging role in the international climate negotiations).
Professor Roberts co-founded the Climate and Development Lab in the Spring of 2011 to focus on issues of climate inequity within global politics. He brought a team of fellows with him to COP16 in Cancun, Mexico and COP17 in Durban, South Africa. In addition to providing the most recent information on Professor Robert’s research, this blog also serves as one of the main outlets for the Climate and Development Lab’s reports and analyses.
David Ciplet
Ph.D. Candidate and Researcher, Brown University Department of Sociology
Sociology and Environmental Studies
Email: David_Ciplet(at)brown.edu
David Ciplet’s research explores issues of power and inequality in environmental governance. He has contributed to this area through qualitative analysis of case studies that extend from community efforts for environmental justice, to national energy policy-making, to international climate change negotiations. His focus is on how coalitions with divergent interests mobilize and compete to shape natural resource markets and relationships of power in environmental governance.
He has three main projects. First, he has spent three years conducting international fieldwork and publishing on issues of inequality in global climate change politics. He is currently co-authoring a book manuscript with Timmons Roberts and Mizan Khan called Power in a Warming World, contracted with The MIT Press. Second, his dissertation explores the politics behind the contemporary US electricity market—the sector with the largest climate change footprint. In this project, he is investigating how social forces have shaped the dramatic and rapid “power shift” from coal to natural gas dominance in the US electricity sector. Third, he has explored ethical practices in community-engaged research through a series of case studies on environmental health research initiatives. Ciplet has published articles in Global Environmental Politics and Social Movement Studies.
He is a co-coordinater and co-founder of the Climate and Development Lab at Brown with Timmons Roberts and Guy Edwards. He has also been the lead author of a series of seven policy reports focused on issues of equity in climate change policy, published by organizations including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the International Institute for Environment and Development, and Climate Strategies.
