Climate Politics & Global Governance
Epistemic Exclusion in Climate Science:
Why We Grow the Wrong Trees in the Wrong Places
Dissertation paper (Revise & Resubmit at European Journal of International Relations)
*Winner ISA Robert W. and Jessie Cox Award 2025
*Winner ISA Best Graduate Paper Award in Science, Technology, and Art in International Relations 2026
*Honorable Mention ISA Fred Hartmann Award 2024
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) advocates planting trees in the Global South to cool down our global temperature. The intuition that growing trees is good for fighting climate change has been naturalized by mainstream climate science in the Global North. Yet, as biologists and ecologists point out, trees (especially in the tropics) emit gases known as BVOCs that can further exacerbate global warming. Why then do we grow the wrong trees in the wrong places? And why, given the espoused scientific commitment to pluralism as well as the interdisciplinary and global nature of climate change, are some scientific perspectives, especially biologists and ecologists from the Global South, not well integrated into mainstream climate science? I show that rendering the climate as a singular legible entity solely from a universalist epistemology erects structural barriers to more heterogenous scientific studies of local ecologies from being integrated. Moreover, because models of the climate are based on environmental assumptions and tools of the Global North, they struggle to incorporate knowledge where these assumptions do not hold – especially in the Global South, where trees are more likely to emit gases that can exacerbate climate change – leading to international climate policies that ironically harms, rather than helps, the planet. I illustrate these challenges to integrating knowledge on BVOCs into mainstream climate models based on 50 interviews with climate scientists in both the Global North and Global South, as well as fieldwork based in climate science labs in the U.S. and Thailand.​
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Emotions and Expert Authority in Global Governance
With Amoz JY Hor (published in the Oxford Handbook of Emotions in International Relations)
Emotions are often overlooked but crucial in global governance. This chapter helps fill this gap by theorizing the emotional underpinnings of why people submit and even desire international expert authority in global governance. The chapter argues that the allure of expert authority is that it offers a way of coping with powerlessness in international politics. The chapter expands this argument through three sources of theoretical inspiration: Erich Fromm explains the emotional appeal of inhibiting authority, Melanie Klein demonstrates why the technical realities that experts construct can be so alluring, and Sara Ahmed shows how expertise itself circulates fear and faith in their own authority. These can be read as separate frameworks or steps that build on each other. The chapter illustrates these with brief examples in global governance, especially humanitarianism, climate governance, and nuclear politics.
From Carbon to Credit:
The Politics of Carbon Verification Standards
work in progress
Carbon markets take it for granted that we can measure, verify, and thus transact, carbon emissions. This paper unpacks the black box of how “carbon” gets verified as “credits” in voluntary carbon markets, with focus on why some carbon verification standards are used, but not others, with particular attention to the standards adopted in Southeast Asia—an emerging hub for voluntary carbon markets. Thw paper challenges the conventional wisdom that higher-priced carbon credits signal higher-quality projects, under the assumption that more expensive verification processes ensure stronger environmental integrity. Drawing on preliminary interviews with local standard developers, credit sellers, buyers, verifiers, and regulators, I find that although localized standards such as Thailand’s T-VER provide more accurate, ecologically grounded, and cost-effective measures, multinational corporations operating in Thailand prefer internationally recognized standards such as Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard (VCS). This preference mainly stems from the need to satisfy audiences in corporate headquarters in developed countries. The paper illustrates how business interests in the Global North shape the dominance of global carbon credit standards in the Global South such as in Southeast Asia, which can undermine both local markets and local expertise in the global carbon economy.
Local Visions of Expert Authority: Why the IMF was Received as Experts in Thailand, but Shunned in Malaysia
work in progress
Why do some countries adopt advice or knowledge from some experts, but not from the others? Constructivist research argues that experts in international organizations can exert their power over states due to their technical knowledge and legitimacy. However, not all experts are always accepted as “legitimate experts” by all countries as people who have an authoritative claim on expertise. While the majority of the literature tends to treat expertise as a resource of experts, this paper conceptualizes expertise relationally. Borrowing from James Scott and Social Epistemology, I conceptualize two types of expert knowledge as constituted by different relationships with other knowledges: a universalist episteme (or techne) where one has a faith in the ability of technical knowledge to apply regardless of context; on the other, one might have a localist episteme (or metis) where one privileges the practical knowledge that is developed to solve problems of a given context. I argue that the IMF's expertise was recieved in Thailand because Thailand understood the economy in the realm of techne, whereas the IMF's expertise was rejected in Malaysia because Malaysia understood the economy in the real of metis.