Dr Christian Downie

Dr Christian Downie is a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. His research focusses on global energy and climate policy and the role different state and non-state actors play at different levels to shape global outcomes. He works at the intersection of environmental politics, global governance, regulation and negotiation studies. Christian’s research aims to improve international outcomes on two of the most critical challenges facing the world; climate change and energy security, and in doing so provide strategies for policymakers and diplomats to influence global outcomes.

Christian is the author of The Politics of Climate Change Negotiations, which was published in 2014. It describes the successes and failures of protracted international negotiations and analyses the lessons they hold for the future. Based on more than 100 interviews with American and European insiders to the international climate change negotiations, the book reveals the importance of the temporal dimension in long international negotiations. Once this is taken into account, it becomes clear not only that state preferences are fluid not fixed, as is generally assumed, but that there are specific strategies that actors can employ to steer prolonged international negotiations toward their preferred outcome.

Prior to his research appointments in 2014, Christian was foreign policy advisor to the Australian Government’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and a climate policy advisor to the Department of Climate Change. Christian holds a PhD in international relations and political science from ANU, having graduated from the University of Sydney with first class honours in economics. He has spent time teaching or researching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Chulalongkorn, among others, and he has worked in policy think tanks in Canberra and Washington D.C.