BOOK PROJECT
CHASING THE SUN: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOLAR INVESTMENT IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH
How can developing countries sustain their energy transitions? Foreign direct investment is often cited as critical for renewable energy growth in low and middle income countries. Using an original dataset of solar projects, I show that while large foreign investors lead to quick initial growth, countries dependent on foreign investment experience a boom-and-bust cycle. In contrast, those with more domestic investment grow at a slower but steady pace. I argue that these differences stem from firm embeddedness and outside options in the face of regulatory challenges in renewable energy. When faced with regulatory roadblocks, local firms use their political connections to lobby, whereas foreign firms invest elsewhere. I find support for this argument through large-N observational analysis of policy adoption, as well as interviews with over 100 firms and government officials in Malaysia, Colombia, and Panama.
PUBLICATIONS
When do Local Governments Adopt New Technology? Agency Size and Bureaucratic Champions for Open Transit Data with Alison E. Post, Tanu Kumar, Mridang Sheth (Urban Affairs Review, 2025).
When do local governments adopt new citizen-facing technology to improve public service delivery? Much existing work predicts that governments facing greater competition will be more likely to reform. In contrast, we develop a bureaucracy-driven account of technology adoption arguing that the actions of agencies are constrained by their size, resources, and employee motivations. We compare empirical support for both perspectives by examining variation in the adoption and use of online scheduling information for public transit (GTFS), a transformative technology that makes transit far easier for riders to use. In California, we find that city and county-controlled transit agencies adopted GTFS later than special districts less exposed to political competition, and that large agencies where internal champions faced fewer technical and resource constraints outpaced smaller ones. Interview and survey evidence provide support for the mechanisms underpinning our theory. These results underscore the importance of studying bureaucratic drivers of technology and policy adoption more broadly.
The politics of police technology adoption: Agency size and uptake among California police departments with Alison E. Post and Ángel Mendiola Ross (Journal of Urban Affairs, 2025).
Who governs policing, one of the primary points of everyday contact between individuals and government? When defining policy, are elected officials responding primarily to public opinion and their partisan base, deferring to powerful police agencies, or mimicking neighboring jurisdictions? We examine this question in the context of decision-making regarding the adoption of controversial new policing technologies that leverage information and communication technologies. Drawing on a new dataset that tracks municipal adoption across several policing technologies in the state of California, we find that the strongest predictor of adoption across technology type is the number of sworn officers in a municipality. We also find evidence of spatial diffusion, with cities more likely to adopt technologies their neighbors have implemented. Our findings suggest that the influence of bureaucracies and geographic proximity warrant more attention in studies of local and urban politics.
Studying Tech Adoption with “Text-As-Data”: Opportunities, Pitfalls, and Complementarities in the Case of Transportation with Shih-Hung Chiu, Tianyu Han, Alison E. Post, and, Kenichi Soga (Environment and Planning B, 2025).
The rapid digitization and publication of local government records presents researchers with an unprecedented chance to study governance processes. In tandem, advances in computer science and statistics–alongside significant increases in computational power–have led to the development of “text as data” methods and their application to social science and policy research. This paper evaluates the potential utility of digitized public meeting minutes and meeting recordings for studying decision-making about technology adoption by local public agencies, using survey data on the same topic as a benchmark. Focusing on transit agencies in California, we evaluate each data source with respect to overall data availability, bias in data availability, and the types of information about technology adoption contained. We find that meeting minutes and video recordings are available for more than twice as many agencies than for a state transit agency-sponsored survey, and that the availability of digitized records is not skewed towards larger agencies, as is the case for survey data. Meanwhile, with respect to the type of information available about technology adoption in these three data sources, we find important complementarities.
WORKING PAPERS
Does Manufacturing Matter? Foreign investment and local linkages in the solar industry (R&R at Review of International Political Economy).
The rise of green industrial policy has catapulted renewable energy manufacturing into the spotlight as a catalyst for energy transition. In light of the US China trade war, Chinese solar manufacturers relocated operations to Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. Will this investment spark renewable energy growth? I draw upon bilateral solar panel trade data, interviews with domestic firms, and spatial patterns in local solar installation to show that Chinese production relocation had minimal effect on both backwards linkages with local suppliers and local solar installation. Rather, Chinese panels assembled in Southeast Asia use imported components and are destined for export to Western countries. Upstream, Chinese manufacturers are vertically integrated and source products from China, and downstream, profit more from exporting to the United States than selling to locals. Instead, solar project owners actually import panels from mainland China. The only local linkage lies in the direct employment of locals in the manufacturing facilities themselves. This calls into question existing green industrial policy scholarship that emphasizes the localization of production for downstream market growth.
What Money Can’t Buy: Company experience and local resistance to large scale renewable energy with José Vega-Araújo (Submitted).
Renewable energy has grown exponentially, but projects and associated infrastructure increasingly provoke local resistance. Although investment offers opportunities, conflict is often driven by deeper social, cultural, and political dynamics. We argue that renewable energy conflict arises from what money alone cannot buy: local context. Companies frequently operate with incomplete information about communities’ capacity for collective mobilization, particularly in the remote areas most suitable for large-scale renewable energy deployment. When companies underestimate a community’s capacity for collective mobilization, projects are more likely to escalate into conflict. Drawing on qualitative evidence from La Guajira, Colombia, we show how companies’ experience re-shapes local resistance. Interviews with 30 stakeholders — including project developers, community members, and government officials — reveal that early project developers misjudged the potential for community mobilization, while later entrants adjusted their compensation schemes, benefit-sharing arrangements, and community engagement strategies accordingly. These findings underscore the critical role of local context, learning, and uncertainty in shaping community responses to renewable energy infrastructure.
Green Power, Indigenous Protest: Understanding Wind Energy Opposition in the Developing World with Jennifer Hadden and Taib Biygautane (Submitted).
Addressing the demands of global climate change and sustainable development requires building more green energy infrastructure. But rapid renewable expansion faces political and social obstacles, including growing local opposition and protest. This paper offers the first cross-national analysis of the determinants of wind project opposition across the developing world. Combining a global database of proposed wind projects and an original protest-event analysis, we examine how project, firm, and community characteristics shape the likelihood of a wind project being opposed. We pay particular attention to projects sited on Indigenous land, where the global norm of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) may alter the political opportunity structure for local mobilization. Using logistic regression, we find that siting on Indigenous land is the only factor consistently associated with higher rates of opposition. Contrary to findings from the industrialized North, opposition is not systematically correlated with economic development levels or prior energy infrastructure experience. A qualitative case study of the Guajira Wind Farm in Colombia illustrates how FPIC norms facilitate Indigenous mobilization and negotiation. Our findings contribute to research on siting politics, Indigenous governance, and energy justice, highlighting policy interventions that help to promote social acceptance and the just siting of renewable projects.
WORK IN PROGRESS
Focusing Green Industrial Policy: Sectoral Competitiveness for Energy Transition with Bentley Allan, Benjamin Bagozzi, and Jonas Goldman.
Green industrial policy must be focused to be effective. Countries need to make difficult decisions about where they can compete both before they begin, and as they monitor and evaluate policy success. What sectors and subsectors are countries likely to be competitive in? Existing approaches seek to use export data to predict production capacity or create simple multifactor indices. We build on these approaches with a machine learning model that seeks to evaluate future competitiveness across 12 green industries. Our model brings together exports, foreign direct investment inflows, natural resources, and existing assets and infrastructure together in a probabilistic model. We train the model on historical data in established industries including solar panels and electric vehicles components, to forecast countries’ competitiveness in cutting-edge green technologies. This allows us to evaluate the model’s predictions against real data and increases our confidence in the accuracy of our forecasts in emerging technologies. Our approach combines existing strengths with future potential, to balance existing capabilities with future possibilities, in order to keep the space for creative action open. This tool can support countries seeking to identify their best sectoral and subsectoral opportunities in the energy transition.
Constructing Comparative Advantage: How Industrial Legacies Shape Green Technology Competition with Bentley Allan and Benjamin Bagozzi.
Green technology manufacturing provides a pathway towards both industrial upgrading and economic development. Yet in practice, among large emerging economies, there is considerable variation in green manufacturing growth. Why are some countries competitive exporters of green technologies, while others with similar levels of development lag behind? Rather than treating green technology manufacturing as a homogenous set of industrial activities, we argue that competitiveness maps on to a country’s industrial base, or pre-existing configuration of manufacturing capabilities, firm networks, and human capital. Focusing on the cases of wind and solar, as two critical technologies for energy transition, the paper applies interpretable machine learning to identify the drivers of comparative advantages in both exports and manufacturing capacity across each technology. This approach reveals the different industrial capabilities necessary for wind and solar and shows that there are two key pathways to green manufacturing leadership: production for the domestic market versus export competitiveness. We draw out these insights through two illustrative cases: Brazil and India. Both are large emerging economies with significant renewable energy potential, but each represents a distinct pattern of green manufacturing growth. Brazil has built substantial wind turbine production capacity to meet domestic demand but lags behind in both wind and solar export competition. India, by contrast, has achieved extremely strong export competitiveness in wind, has high solar capacity, and is growing in solar competition, despite facing many of the same macroeconomic and institutional constraints. These differences, despite similar levels of development, underscore the importance of understanding green production in the context of the domestic industrial base.
When the River Runs Dry: Political Barriers to Climate Policy Implementation with Anthony Calacino, Jonathan Guy, and Aaditee Shankar.
Do climate shocks lead to climate action? Existing research argues that climate shocks can shift public opinion and spur policy change. We theorize that shocks create demand for policy adoption, but that political incentives to follow through on these policies are weak, leading to non-implementation. We test these claims in the context of a climate shock especially likely to induce policy change: Drought-induced hydropower shortages, or hydrostress. Leveraging a novel measurement strategy using fine-grained global hydrological data, we find that hydrostress increases the adoption of policies promoting alternative renewable energy. Consistent with our theory, however, these policies have little average effect on energy outcomes, revealing a persistent implementation gap. We develop and test several explanations for this gap using cross-national data, survey experiments, and more than 100 original interviews across four major hydropower-dependent countries. The balance of evidence suggests that retrospective accountability deficits, low state capacity, and elite capture play important roles in stymieing implementation. Our findings illuminate key political drivers of climate inaction.
POLICY REPORTS:
Alison E. Post, Ishana Ratan, Mary C. Hill, Amy Huang, Kenichi Soga, Bingyu Zhao. “Benchmarking “Smart City” Technology Adoption in California: An Innovative Web Platform for Exploring New Data and Tracking Adoption.” 2022. Research Report. Institute for Transportation Studies, U.C. Berkeley.
Amy Huang, Alison E. Post, Ishana Ratan, Mary C. Hill, Bingyu Zhao. “Where are Private “Smart City” Transportation Technologies Concentrated in California?.” 2022. Policy Brief. Institute for Transportation Studies, U.C. Berkeley.
ISHANA RATAN 