William Kakenmaster

Bill Kakenmaster will join the Department of Political Science and The Murphy Institute as an Assistant Professor in July 2027. His research examines the political economy of climate change and the environment, focusing in particular on climate mitigation in authoritarian regimes. His current book project, Decarbonizing Dictatorship: Explaining Climate Action in Nondemocracies, analyzes how energy resource endowments, executive constraints, and leaders' political survival strategies shape political incentives and opportunities for climate action. Other research examines questions related to climate adaptation, conceptualization and measurement, and energy export finance. Bill's research has been published in Climate Policy, Global Environmental Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Nature Climate Change, and World Development. Before coming to Tulane, Bill was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian National University and earned his PhD from the University of Notre Dame in 2025.