Jamilah Christiansen

Jamilah’s research interests are in the areas of climate change, environmental justice, sustainability, political economy, and quantitative methods. Her work has explored the effects of governance and climate impacts on environmental conflicts. Broadly, her research uncovers the cross-national effects of neoliberal environmentalism on sustainability efforts and the determinants of environmental outcomes, such as emissions or forest loss. Taken together, her work demonstrates how multinational corporations, international financial institutions, and other global, neoliberal organizations facilitate poor environmental outcomes, health issues, and stymie sustainable policy efforts, particularly in low and middle-income nations. Using a cross-national perspective, she illustrates the ways in which powerful financial institutions target nations with the fewest economic and political resources in order to extract the most natural resources possible with the least amount of oversight, labor rights, and environmental protections, ultimately advancing an imperialist project to claim and capture. This research highlights the injustice built into many of the structures and systems that are woven into our daily lives, and the ways in which colonialist projects are able to continue under the guise of advancement and progress. In both her research and teaching, she is dedicated to shedding light on how powerful institutions perpetuate and reify social hierarchies, harmful ideologies, and existing inequalities.