People

Kate O’Neill is a professor of Global Environmental Governance and the Global/Local Politics of Wastes and Recycling in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. As a nationally and internationally recognized expert in global environmental politics and governance, her research addresses how (and how well) the global community manages complex, unpredictable, and distributionally unjust  problems, from the climate crisis to biodiversity loss, to wastes and chemical pollution. She is fascinated by the complexities of wastes as a global resource, and the implications of seismic global shifts on local recycling, waste work, and zero waste policies in the US and elsewhere. Kate is also Associate Dean for Instruction and Student Affairs at the Rausser College of Natural Resources. She has chaired her academic division, and served on campus and UC system wide task forces on student experiences and curriculum development. Kate holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She has written three books, Waste Trading Among Rich Nations: Building a New Theory of Environmental Regulation  (MIT Press, 2000) The Environment and International Relations (Cambridge University Press 2009, 2nd edition 2017), and Waste (Polity Press 2019).