Todd Eisenstadt

Todd Eisenstadt, Professor of Government in the School of Public Affairs, serves as research director of the Center for Environmental Policy (CEP). He has worked on six continents, publishing multiple award-winning books and dozens of articles on climate change and environmental policy, and political development. He recently co-authored Climate Change, Science, and the Politics of Shared Sacrifice (Oxford University Press 2022) and has written extensively on climate finance and adaptation in the developing world as a principal investigator of World Bank and the National Science Foundation grants.  Most recently, he has been looking at correlates of respondents’ propensity to migrate from a 2022 national survey he and colleagues directed in Guatemala and is identifying means of understanding politicians’ time horizons in how (and whether) they address climate mitigation and adaptation.  In 2019, he published Who Speaks for Nature? Indigenous Environmental Movements, Public Opinion, and Ecuador’s Petro-State, studying rural, indigenous communities to understand how they experience climate vulnerability, especially in areas of heavy oil extraction in Ecuador’s Amazon region. Published by the Oxford University Press, the book stems in part from an earlier book, Politics, Identity, and Mexico’s Indigenous Rights Movements (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Eisenstadt’s research has been funded by the Council on Foreign Relations, The World Bank, Fulbright Commission, the National Security Education Program (NSEP), the Ford and Mellon foundations, USAID, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). At American University, he has served as chair of the Department of Government, the American University Faculty Senate and the Committee on Faculty Actions and served as the Board of Trustees’ faculty representative. He has also won several teaching awards and has held visiting appointments at El Colegio de México and CIDE (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas) in Mexico City, Harvard University, the University of California, San Diego, and the Latin American Social Science Faculty (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador. Eisenstadt is a hobbyist magician and is one of five popularly elected members of the Garrett Park Town Council in Maryland.