Luke Sanford is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and Governance at Yale School of the Environment. He graduated in 2021 with a PhD in Political Science and International Affairs from the Political Science department and the School of Global Policy and Strategy. His work focuses on environmental policymaking–especially how political institutions mediate the relationship between the environmental preferences of constituents and the incentives and actions of policymakers. He also studies the distributional consequences over space and time of decisions about natural resources, and how those play into policymaking. He develops methods for using new sources of digital data, including text and satellite images, to measure individual and group preferences, and to observe outcomes on the ground. I use those to help understand preferences for different policies, and what the effects of those policies are.
