About
Letter from the Chair(s)
The Department of Environmental Social Science is the Doerr School’s newest department. Most global sustainability challenges are a result of choices made by humans, and most will be solved by humans making different choices. Understanding these choices – what they are, how they are made, what impact they have, and how they could be made differently – are a core focus of our department. Our mission is to shed light on these root causes of humanity’s sustainability challenges, to design and evaluate potential public policies, business strategies, and behavioral interventions that can help solve these challenges, and to educate future scholars and leaders who will further our mission of understanding and solving these challenges. We have a rapidly growing community of scholars from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds devoted to understanding and solving sustainability challenges.
What We Do
Our department is organized into two broad areas, Environmental Behavioral Science (EBS) and Global Environmental Policy (GEP), with distinct faculty and teaching programs in each but with substantial collaboration between the two. GEP faculty draw heavily from economics, political science, and related fields, and focus on the design and implementation of policies and institutions that jointly improve environmental and human outcomes, on understanding which institutional, policy, or technological approaches are economically optimal, politically feasible, and equitable, and on the development of better methods to aid in the design, evaluation, or implementation of policy. EBS faculty are drawn from sociology, psychology, history, geography, law, and decision science, and are focused on the study of human behavior, human ecology, and human institutions as they pertain to sustainability.