Dr. Sikina Jinnah is an Associate Professor of Politics. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Environmental, Science, Policy, and Management and joined the UCSC Politics faculty in Fall 2016.
Her research focuses on the shifting locations of power and influence in global environmental governance, particularly the role of transnational actors in environmental decision-making. Her most recent projects examine how key norms in global climate politics shape power relations, the role of U.S. preferential trade agreements in shaping environmental policy in trading partner nations, and the politics of climate engineering governance.
Her first book, Post-treaty Politics: Secretariat Influence in Global Environmental Governance (MIT Press 2014), received the 2016 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for best book in international environmental affairs from the International Studies Association. The book examines the role of international bureaucracies in managing the politics of overlapping international regimes in the areas of biodiversity, climate change and international trade.
Her second book (with Simon Nicholson), New Earth Politics: Essays from the Anthropocene (MIT Press 2016) engages leading scholars in a discussion over the role of global environmental politics in the age of the Anthropocene. She is currently working on a third book, Trading the Environment, which examines the role of preferential trade agreements in securing environmental objectives.
Dr. Jinnah's research has also been published in several scholarly journals, including: Global Environmental Politics, the Journal of Environment and Development, Environmental Research Letters, Berkeley Journal of International Law Publicist, Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, and Science.
Her UCSC courses include: International Relations and the Environment (POLI 170), Global Climate Change Politics (POLI 190U), and Trade-Environment Politics (POLI 162).
Prior to coming to UCSC she was an Assistant and Associate Professor of International Relations at American University's School of International Service. She held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies and was also a consultant for the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), where she reported on CITES and UNFCCC processes for IISD's Earth Negotiations Bulletin. She currently serves on the editorial board for the journal Global Environmental Politics, is a Senior Research Fellow with the Earth System Governance project, and is a member of the Academic Working Group on International Governance of Climate Engineering at the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment.
