Affiliated Faculty

Nives Dolšak (PhD, Indiana University)

(425) 352-3492
e-mail: ndolsak@uwb.edu

Nives Dolšak

Nives is an assistant professor at University of Washington, Bothell. She received a Joint Ph.D. from School of Public & Environmental Affairs and the Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington. She received a B.A. in Economics from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Before coming to the UW, she was a research associate at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at the Indiana University, Bloomington.

Her research examines institutional challenges in governing common pool resources at multiple levels of aggregation. Her doctoral dissertation, "Marketable Permits: Managing Local, Regional, and Global Commons", analyzes the applicability of marketable permits for managing natural common-pool resources of various spatial extents.

She has co-edited two volumes. The first volume, "The Drama of the Commons", was published under the aegis of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council's Committee on Human Dimensions of Global Change. This interdisciplinary volume reviews theoretical advancements in the study of common pool resources that have been made in the last 15 years and provides a fairly broad introduction to the field for readers unfamiliar with it and provocative research suggestions for researchers. The second volume, "The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and Adaptation", co-edited with Professor Elinor Ostrom, in print by the MIT Press, analyzes new challenges that owners, managers, policy makers, and analysts face in managing natural commons, such as forests, water resources, and fisheries. In particular, it examines challenges in managing commons, caused by new findings about physical characteristics of the commons, their complexity and interconnectedness, new institutional arrangements both at micro (privatization) and macro level (economic and political changes in countries and regions), and the role of financial, social, and political capital in the commons governance.

Her other research includes a study of factors affecting countries' decision to cooperate in international regimes, in particular the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto protocol, an examination of interlinkages between local and global air pollution caused by electricity generation, potentials for increasing energy efficiency in the east European countries in transition and in the U.S.A. With Professor Daniel Jaffe and Professor Lyatt Jaegle, both at University of Washington, she analyzes the importance of trans-Pacific air pollution for attainment of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards and examines various domestic and international policy options for mitigating the above effects.