Nature is under immediate and increasing threat. Tales of destruction and deforestation abound despite the myriad interventions and investments by government bureaucracies, non-government organizations, and private land-owners. As the extinction crisis looms larger and demands on the public purse grow greater, understanding how science becomes policy and policy practice is more important than ever. As a result, and in response to the increasing insularity of conservation biology that has consciously nourished a careful separation of knowledge and action, of scientist and actor, I use this dissertation to navigate the nexus of conservation science, policy, and practice. I employ case studies in forest hydrology and species conservation, as well as cognitive theory, to examine how conservation science becomes policy. I collected field data from Lake Mead National Recreation Area and from the World Bank to explore how policies are translated into practice.

Current assumptions in conservation biology apportions these three separate but equal disciplines - science, policy, and practice - into one greater and two lesser, one that is pure and two that are sticky. But the transmission of knowledge from the Academy to the domains of conservation policy and practice...

This dissertation examines the variation in the choice of FDI regulations. Why do some countries restrict the entry and operations of foreign MNEs while others permit and even seek inward FDI? What factors determine the choice of FDI regulations and what conditions are likely to bring about their reform? This study identifies the political dynamics leading to the improvement or deterioration of investment climates in transition economies and beyond.

I argue that FDI policies depend on the level of political competition and the anticipated distributional implications of FDI liberalization for the main constituencies that back the government in office. Democratic governments, which derive political power from domestic workers who benefit from investments by foreign firms, liberalize FDI regulations. By contrast, non-democratic leaders, who fear that FDI would upset the balance of domestic economic power and undermine the privileged position of domestic industrialists who support the regime, continue to restrict foreign investment.

I examine the choice of FDI regulations using a newly constructed database of FDI regulations in 28 transition economies between 1989 and 2008, an index of investment freedom available for a worldwide sample starting in 1994...

My dissertation, Critical Realism: An Ethical Approach to Global Politics, investigates two strands of modern political realism and their divergent ethics, politics, and modes of inquiry: the mid- to late 20th century realism of Hans Morgenthau and E.H. Carr and the scientific realism of contemporary International Relations scholarship. Beginning with the latter, I engage in (1) immanent analysis to show how scientific realism fails to meet its own explanatory protocol and (2) genealogy to recover the normative origins of the conceptual and analytical components of scientific realism. Against the backdrop of scientific realism's empirical and normative shortcomings, I turn to Morgenthau and Carr to appraise what I term their critical realism. I map out the constellation of their political thought by reconstructing the interrelations between (1) the historical crises motivating their writings, (2) their philosophical and methodological criticisms and commitments, (3) their political prescriptions and ethics. My dissertation demonstrates how reading realist texts through the lens of contemporary methodological conventions decisively shapes our theoretical purview, empirical knowledge, and political judgments. Beyond illuminating the underappreciated radical...

This dissertation examines the relationship between architecture and democratic politics in late-modernity. It identifies the refusal of architects to consider the political dimensions of their work following the failures of 20th century High Modernism and the scant attention that the intersection between architecture and politics has received from political theorists as a problem. In order to address these deficiencies, the dissertation argues for the continued impact of architecture and urban planning on modern subject formation, ethics, and politics under the conditions of de-centralized sovereignty that characterize late-modernity. Following an opening chapter which establishes the mutual relation architectural design and political culture in the founding text of political science, Aristotle's Politics, the dissertation offers a genealogical critique of modern architectural design and urban planning practices. It concludes that modern architecture shapes individual and collective political possibilities and a recursive relationship exists between the spaces "we" inhabit and the people that "we" are. In particular, it finds that there is a strong link between practices of external circulation and the interior circulation of thoughts about the self and others. The dissertation concludes by proposing a new understanding of architecture that dynamically relates the design of material structures and the forms of political practices that those designs facilitate. This new definition of architecture combines political theorist Hannah Arendt's concept of "world-building action" with the concept of the "threshold" developed and refined by Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger.