Research Areas
My research examines how emerging technologies and sustainability transitions become governable when inherited institutions do not fit new policy problems. Across AI governance, autonomous systems, data-center infrastructure, clean energy transitions, collaborative governance, nonprofit and civil society action, and urban governance, I study how actors classify new problems, settle authority, build venues, and create procedural rules before stable policy systems fully exist.
Contested Rule Formation and Institutional Mismatch
A framework for early-phase governance of disruptive innovations, focusing on classification, jurisdiction, venue settlement, and procedural rule formation.
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AI and Emerging Technology Governance
Institutional readiness, accountability lag, and procedural governance for AI, autonomous systems, and digital infrastructures.
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Clean Energy, Rule Location, and Constrained Polycentricity
Where governance actually lands in clean energy transitions under preemption, utility authority, and constrained polycentricity.
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Civil Society, Nonprofits, and Shadow Rule-Making
How nonprofits and communities make emerging problems governable through intervention, venue activation, and rule-object production.
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Collaborative Governance and Design Methods
Methods to study institutional change, attention reallocation, and design–implementation gaps in complex governance systems.
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Urban Planning, Public Space, and Community Wellbeing
A secondary research stream on women’s experiences in public spaces, age-friendly public realms, accessibility, safety, and community wellbeing.
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Methods and Evidence
I use qualitative case analysis, process tracing, documentary analysis, structured comparison, mixed methods, text-as-data, and systems modeling to make governance empirically observable through rules, venues, routines, and accountability.
Research Grants and Sponsored Research
Selected externally funded research projects connected to my broader agenda on governance, sustainability transitions, socio-technical systems, institutional design, and collaborative policy implementation.
Convergent Anthropocene Systems (Anthems) – A System-of-Systems Paradigm
Chesapeake Bay Program Governance Decision Support System Modeling.
EPA Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund Solar for All Grant
Solar for All funded work through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency via a subcontract with The Nature Conservancy.
Assessing the Potential for Transactive Energy Communities in Rural New Hampshire
Research on transactive energy communities, rural energy systems, and the governance implications of emerging energy infrastructures.
Contested Rule Formation
CRF explains early-phase governance under institutional mismatch: the upstream period in which actors are still deciding what the policy object is, who has authority, where decisions belong, and what procedural rules can make governance durable.
Core framework
Contested Rule Formation is intentionally bounded. It complements established policy process theories by focusing on the constitutive phase before stable subsystems, settled venues, and durable substantive standards exist.
Its central question is not only what policy should be adopted, but how a new domain becomes governable in the first place.
Institutional mismatch dimensions
Institutional mismatch appears when emerging technologies or transitions do not fit existing rules, authority structures, venues, or interpretive frames.
Central research question: How do actors make emerging policy domains governable before stable classifications, venues, and procedural rules fully exist?
Upstream AI Governance
My AI governance work asks when AI systems, autonomous technologies, and AI infrastructures become institutionally governable—not merely technically deployable.
This research focuses on institutional readiness, accountability lag, procedural templates, data-center infrastructure, and public accountability.
AI governance pillars
- Institutional readiness for public-sector AI
- Accountability lag in embodied autonomous systems
- AI infrastructure and data centers as material governance problems
- Procedural governance, documentation, review, and correction
- Civil society participation in AI rule formation
Institutional readiness
AI readiness is not simply adoption capacity. A government may acquire AI tools without having the classifications, review procedures, documentation rules, procurement standards, or correction mechanisms needed to govern them.
Accountability lag
Autonomous systems can produce visible public disruptions before institutions have settled who is responsible, which venue should respond, what information firms must disclose, and how harms should be reviewed or corrected.
Clean Energy Governance
My clean-energy research examines where governance actually lands when local governments pursue decarbonization under constrained authority, state preemption, and utility-centered regulatory systems.
Rule location
Rather than treating climate commitments or sustainability plans as evidence of governance capacity by themselves, I trace where clean energy rules become operational: statutes, regulatory orders, municipal instruments, procurement rules, program manuals, partnership agreements, eligibility criteria, and rules-in-use.
Constrained polycentricity
This work examines how local governments, nonprofits, and intermediaries create governable pathways in program-facing and procurement domains even when core electricity authority remains concentrated in state-level or utility-centered venues.
Energy justice as rule design
My work treats energy justice not only as a goal or value, but as something that becomes administratively real through eligibility rules, documentation burdens, participation procedures, access criteria, and accountability mechanisms.
Local implementation under constraint
This research explains how clean energy governance can advance through local capacity, interdepartmental coordination, nonprofit support, technical assistance, regional collaboration, and practical rule-making even when higher-level authority is limited or politically constrained.
Central research question: Where does clean energy governance actually occur when formal authority over the core energy regime is constrained?
Civil Society and Nonprofits
A central question in my work is how civil society actors shape governance when formal venues are closed, constrained, or poorly matched to emerging policy problems.
Beyond advocacy
Nonprofits and community organizations often do more than advocate. They translate information, activate venues, produce templates, coordinate implementation, and create rule objects that shape how policy is experienced on the ground.
Shadow rule-making
I study when nonprofit and civil society action becomes procedurally consequential: when it changes eligibility criteria, participation routines, documentation practices, accountability channels, or implementation rules.
Community knowledge and legitimacy
Civil society organizations can make institutional mismatch visible by documenting harms, translating community experience, producing public evidence, and pressing formal institutions to recognize problems they have not yet classified.
AI infrastructure and data centers
In the context of AI infrastructure, nonprofits and communities can shape governance by contesting data-center siting, energy demand, water use, tax incentives, environmental burdens, and procedural accountability.
Governance under constrained venues
This work examines how nonprofits operate when formal venues are insulated, fragmented, or inaccessible, and how they create alternative rule objects, implementation pathways, and accountability claims.
Collaborative Governance and Design Methods
My methodological work examines how governance arrangements can be studied through rules, venues, implementation routines, institutional design, and systems-level relationships.
Design–implementation gaps
I examine how formal institutional design differs from implementation practice. This includes studying drift, layering, conversion, displacement, and the ways rules-in-form diverge from rules-in-use.
Collaborative governance regimes
My work studies how collaborative governance systems allocate attention, coordinate across boundaries, and create institutional arrangements that shape policy implementation and accountability.
Boundary infrastructure
I examine how boundary organizations, shared tools, technical systems, and cross-sector venues help organize collaboration across agencies, nonprofits, experts, and communities.
Governance diagnostics
This research develops ways to diagnose institutional change by making rules, venues, routines, and implementation relationships visible and comparable across complex governance systems.
Urban Planning, Public Space, and Community Wellbeing
Rooted in my academic background in urban planning, this secondary research stream examines how built environments and public spaces shape inclusion, safety, participation, and community wellbeing.
Women, public space, and lived urban experience
My work in this area focuses especially on women’s experiences in urban public spaces, age-friendly public realms, accessibility, perceived safety, comfort, variety, socio-cultural interaction, environmental quality, and sense of community.
This stream complements my broader public administration and policy agenda by grounding questions of governance and institutional design in lived urban experience.
Gender-sensitive public space
This work examines how public spaces are experienced differently by women and how design, safety, access, comfort, and social interaction shape inclusion in urban public life.
Age-friendly public realms
Research on older women’s public-space criteria examines how age, gender, accessibility, comfort, security, variety, and socio-cultural interaction shape public-realm quality.
Built environment and community wellbeing
This research connects built environment quality to satisfaction, sense of community, and perceived community wellbeing, especially in residential and neighborhood settings.
Spatial equity and governance
The urban-planning stream informs my broader attention to how institutional and design choices shape who can access, use, and benefit from public spaces and urban services.
This is intentionally presented as a secondary research stream. It reflects my urban planning background and equity-oriented scholarship, while my main research agenda centers on institutional mismatch, rule formation, technology governance, clean energy transitions, and civil society rule-making.
Methods and Evidence Approach
Across my research areas, I use methods that make governance empirically visible. I study rules, venues, documents, procedures, implementation routines, organizational relationships, and accountability mechanisms rather than relying only on policy rhetoric or formal commitments.
Governance as observable practice
I examine governance through concrete institutional artifacts: ordinances, regulatory orders, procurement documents, program manuals, guidance, contracts, technical-assistance templates, participation procedures, and accountability routines.
Theory-building across cases
My research uses comparative and mechanism-oriented analysis to build concepts that travel across domains while remaining grounded in specific institutional settings.