Environmental Social Sciences

The Environmental Social Sciences department will discover the causes of sustainability challenges, innovate new solutions to these challenges, and educate future scholars and leaders in how the social sciences can be used to understand and solve sustainability challenges. The department includes two areas: **Environmental Behavioral Sciences** and **Global Environmental Policy**. Our department is organized into two broad areas, Environmental Behavioral Science (EBS) and Global Environmental Policy (GEP), with distinct faculty and teaching programs in each but with substantial collaboration between the two. GEP faculty draw heavily from economics, political science, and related fields, and focus on the design and implementation of policies and institutions that jointly improve environmental and human outcomes, on understanding which institutional, policy, or technological approaches are economically optimal, politically feasible, and equitable, and on the development of better methods to aid in the design, evaluation, or implementation of policy. EBS faculty are drawn from sociology, psychology, history, geography, law, and decision science, and are focused on the study of human behavior, human ecology, and human institutions as they pertain to sustainability.