Kyle Haines

Residency: September 2016 – June 2017

Research Project: Critical Political Ecology and Environmental Crisis: Rhetoric, Development, and Decentralization in the U.S. and Latin America

Research Interests: political theory, comparative institutions, fiscal federalism, bioregionalism, political ecology, development studies, rhetoric, adaptive governance, resilience theory, indigenous sovereignty, payments for ecological services, global climate change, decentralization, U.S.-Mexico border region, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Bolivia and interdisciplinary collaboration

Biography

Kyle Haines is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at UC San Diego, where he researches the benefits and complications of political decentralization for confronting social-ecological issues. He holds a B.A. in comparative politics from UC Santa Cruz.

A political theorist by training, Haines blends insights from past generations of social-ecological thought into the study of contemporary problems, with an emphasis on rigorous application across developmental and cultural contexts. Adding to his analysis of the San Diego and Tijuana bioregion, he has conducted fieldwork in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas and conducated comparative work on indigenous sovereignty programs in Bolivia, including ongoing projects in the Los Laureles sub-basin of the binational Tijuana River Watershed. Haines highlights the ways in which approaching social-ecological issues in areas of divided political sovereignty, cultural difference and physical barriers present special challenges to many traditional theories of green politics and governance.