Robert N. Stavins, a faculty member at the Kennedy School of Government since 1988, has been awarded tenure as professor of public policy at the School, announced Dean Joseph S. Nye Jr.

In addition, Stavins, an economist with primary interest in environmental and resource policy issues, has been appointed faculty chair of the Environment and Natural Resources Program at the School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. A University Fellow of Resources for the Future, Stavins is also a member of the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the board of directors of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, the editorial council of The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and the editorial boards of several other scholarly journals.

Stavins' current research includes the analyses of: technology innovation; environmental benefit valuation; political economy of policy instrument choice; and estimation of carbon sequestration costs. His previous research has focused on diverse areas of environmental economics and policy, including examinations of: policy instrument choice under uncertainty; competitiveness effects of regulation; design and implementation of market-based policy instruments; diffusion of pollution-control technologies; and depletion of forested wetlands. His research has appeared in the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Ecology Law Quarterly, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Resource and Energy Economics, The Energy Journal, Energy Policy, Explorations of Economic History, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, other scholarly and popular periodicals, and several books.

Stavins was director of Project 88, a bipartisan effort co-chaired by former Sen. Timothy Wirth, BA '61, EdM '65, and the late Sen. John Heinz, MBA '63, to develop innovative market-based approaches to environmental and resource problems. Project 88 is widely credited with having significantly influenced the course of environmental policy in the United States and a number of other countries, including the adoption of a path-breaking economic-incentive approach to acid-rain control in the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. Stavins continues to work closely with public officials on matters of national and international environmental policy. He has been a consultant to, among others, the National Academy of Sciences, the President's Council on Sustainable Development, the United Nations Environment Programme, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the World Bank.

Prior to coming to Harvard, Stavins was a staff economist at the Environmental Defense Fund. He has also managed irrigation development in the Middle East and spent four years working in agricultural extension in West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. Stavins holds a B.A. in philosophy from Northwestern University, an M.S. in agricultural economics from Cornell, and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. He is married and has two children.