Bill Kakenmaster is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at Australian National University. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2025, where he was a PhD Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Starting in Fall 2027, he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Murphy Institute at Tulane University.
Bill’s research examines the political economy of climate change and the environment, focusing in particular on climate mitigation in authoritarian regimes. In his current book project, Decarbonizing Dictatorship: Explaining Climate Action in Nondemocracies, he analyzes how energy resources, executive constraints, and leaders’ political survival strategies shape political incentives and opportunities for climate action. In a related project, he shows that executive constraints moderate the effect of fossil fuel wealth on greenhouse gas emissions in authoritarian regimes, while other projects explore questions related to climate change adaptation.
His research has been published in Climate Policy, Global Environmental Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Nature Climate Change, and World Development.