The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis

Christopher Bartlett (academic year) has completed a PhD at the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia. Having worked as a US Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Vanuatu for more than four years prior to commencing formal studies, his current research is strongly geared towards outputs that are of direct benefit and relevance to communities in small island developing states. Chris is most interested in the recent emergence and rapid evolution of novel resource governance institutions in the Pacific islands, including multi-village networks of marine protected areas and customary taboos. With carefully designed comparative case studies, and a suite of cross disciplinary tools, he hopes to better understand social-ecological factors that enable island communities to create and adapt institutions to suit changing global contexts. chribart@indiana.edu

Bryan Bruns (Aug 2009-May 2010) has worked as a consulting sociologist on improving participation in irrigation and water resources management, mostly in Southeast Asia. He has also published articles and co-edited two books on water rights. At the Workshop, he will do research on "Finding Better Ways to Share Water," and more generally on ways of improving institutional design. He will write papers on methods of designing for institutional diversity and ethics in improving institutional artisanship, as well as revising several earlier conference papers to submit for publication. bryanbruns@bryanbruns.com

Jingjing (Crystal) Cai (Aug 2009–Aug 2010). Cai’s research interest is on sustainable governance of common-pool resources. Her current work focuses on the kinds of institutions that support collective action at the community level, especially Forest Resources Management in China. She is also working on how the concepts about common property arrangements or self-governance, developed primarily from work on common pool resources other than forests, might be applied to the study of forest management in China. Included in her work is a discussion of how Professor Elinor Ostrom’s theory could be useful in a practical sense to promote the community based institutions in sustaining local environments and livelihoods in China. caijing@indiana.edu

Carina Cavalcanti (academic year) is a PhD student at the Professorship of Environmental Policy and Economics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. In her research, she investigates the determinants of cooperation among common-pool-resource users. In one of her studies, she finds that social networks play an important role to understand cooperation to a community resource management programme. Carina is especially interested in applied work and has experience in implementing participatory processes in traditional fishing communities. Carina is in her last year of her PhD studies and is very excited to share her field experiences with other researchers and to know more about their research. caridear@indiana.edu

Luz Aliette Hernandez (Fall 2009) is currently a Political Science Ph.D. student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She received her Master of Science in Biology, with specialization in Restoration Ecology from the Ecology Institute of UNAM. She did her undergraduate studies in Biology at the National University of Colombia. She has nine years of professional experience in the collective management of forest resources, through the planning, management, coordination, and implementation of projects in the areas of sustainable rural development, community organization, and civic participation. Her PhD research is focused on the evaluation of the impact of the Mexican governmental program for the development of the community forestry in the quality of life of beneficiaries. Her main objective at the Workshop will be to extend the analytical and methodological framework for her research proposal. luzahern@indiana.edu

Derek Kauneckis (fall 2009) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research examines governance arrangements as they relate to environmental policy, property rights, and state-level science and technology policy. During his stay at the Workshop, he will be working on a book manuscript exploring the diversity in property rights institutions. dkauneck@indiana.edu

Andreas Leibbrandt (academic year) is a Postdoc at the Economics Department of the University of Chicago and has received a PhD from the University of Zurich under supervision of Professor Ernst Fehr. Although he has never caught a fish, he is fascinated by the study of fishermen. So far, he has studied the extent to which the economic preference approach is useful to understanding individual fishing resource exploitation, and whether economic preferences are shaped by different work environments fishermen face. Recently, Andreas has become more and more excited about social networks and their relationship to cooperation behaviour. During his stay at the Workshop, he plans to take the opportunity broaden his horizon, and exchange ideas with researchers from different disciplines to hopefully conduct new interdisciplinary field experiments/studies. aleibbra@indiana.edu

Lei Liu (Aug 2009–Aug 2010) is a PhD candidate at College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, CHINA. His research interests include environmental policy and management. In the past several years, he has participated in a number of projects sponsored by some local governments of China, including policy design for industrial environmental management, strategic environmental assessment, and regional environmental plan, etc. Currently, he is concentrating on the carbon dioxide emission control policy of China and its impact on the international trade. leiliu@indiana.edu

Jiang Nie (Jan 2009–Dec 2009) is an Associate Professor at the school of resources and environmental management, Guizhou College of Finance and Economics, China. Over the years, she has focused on human capital and rural-urban migration. Now she pays more attention to the areas of economic development and environmental policies. At the Workshop, she will work on ecological compensation and rural development using a case study of western China. niej@indiana.edu

Lauri Sääksvuori (Fall 2009) is a PhD candidate in economics at the Max Planck Institute of Economics, Germany. His primary research focus is the bidirectional relation between institutions and human behavior. In particular, the ongoing research projects examine (1) the discovery process of impersonal exchange and its institutional enforcement, (2) intra-group governance in intergroup competition and (3) the cognitive origins of human cooperation. All current studies are strongly behaviorally oriented and apply experimental methods. While at the Workshop, he aims to advance the ongoing research and deepen his knowledge on analytical policy analysis and field experiments. He believes that the methodological expertise on experimental methods combined with the Workshop’s competence on institutional analysis will open up new inspiring avenues of cooperation. lsaaksvu@indiana.edu

Pontus Strimling (academic year). Strimling’s current work is on developing mathematical methods to further the understanding of how cultural phenomena change over time. At the Workshop, he plans to focus on how informal institutions change over time, specifically how corrupt institutions can be turned into non-corrupt institutions. pstrimli@indiana.edu

Jiangtao (Jason) Tan (Aug 2009–Aug 2010) is a Ph.D Candidate at the School of Business, Hohai University, Nanjing, China. His current research focuses on building energy efficiency in China. While here, he will be working on a paper entitled “The Institutional Analysis and Policy Choice to Building Energy Efficiency Industry in China.” jiantan@indiana.edu

Yahua (Bert) Wang (Aug 2009–Aug 2010) is an associate professor at the School of Public Policy and Management, and the deputy director of the Center for China Studies, Tsinghua University, China. His research area is Natural Resources Management and Environmental Policy. Bert has published two books and more than fifty articles in China. His research especially focuses on water management and water policy, and his dissertation was a study of institutional changes of China’s water property rights. At the Workshop, Bert will conduct a visiting study entitled “Institutional Analysis of Irrigation Systems in North China”, which aims to apply the IAD framework to the analysis of China’s participatory irrigation management. In the next few years, Bert will be interested to develop the methodology for institutional analysis and its application in the governance of water and forests in China. Around this goal, he is expected to develop various forms of cooperation with Workshoppers. wangyah@indiana.edu