Dr. Hyeyoon Park is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Politics at the University of Stirling, the UK. Her research spans the areas of global governance, global environmental politics, and global political economy. She focuses on the interplay between global norm development and international power politics and its impact on the agency of various state and non-state actors in transnational environmental governance (with specific focus on China as an emerging power, the business sector and actors from the global South). Her empirical research interests center on transnational governance pertaining to critical mineral resource extraction and green/climate finance. Her work aims to analyze those governance realms from critical perspectives, in terms of global equity and planetary justice.
She has published multiple academic articles on the topics, in high-impact journals such as Global Environmental Politics and Chinese Journal of International Politics, book chapters, and policy reports while working as a former policy researcher at Korea Environment Institute (KEI), a government think tank on environmental policies. Her current projects include the impact of geopolitical rivalries on global governance of critical mineral extraction, multi-level power dynamics in transnational climate finance governance, transparency of private climate finance (TRANSGOV project based at Wageningen University), climate colonialism regarding climate finance, the state’s role in decarbonizing energy-intensive industries (e.g., the steel sector), and climate litigation & norm contestations.
Prior to joining the University of Stirling, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in Political Science at Lund University in Sweden and in the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Born in South Korea, she gained her B.A. in Political Science and International Relations (major) and Law (minor) from Yonsei University in Seoul, her M.A. in Political Science from Free University of Berlin in Germany, and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Colorado State University in the USA. Her PhD dissertation examined China’s role in transparency norm development in global extractives governance, drawing on realist constructivism in International Relations.