Laurence L. Delina

Visiting Research Fellow

Biography

Laurence L. Delina is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and was, from 2015-2019, a Post-doctoral Associate at the Center. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Division of Environment and Sustainability at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is also an Earth System Governance Research Fellow and a Research Associate at the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Delina’s work explores governance and institutional arrangements in the politics and policy of sustainability, focusing on sustainable and just energy transitions and rapid climate mitigation, especially in developing countries. His first book, Strategies for Rapid Climate Mitigation (Routledge 2016), investigates what can be learned from wartime mobilization to achieve rapid deployment of sustainable energy technologies. As a Pardee Center post-doctoral associate, he led a research project on sustainable energy transitions in developing countries. This project led to his second book, Accelerating Sustainable Energy Transition(s) in Developing Countries: The challenges of climate change and sustainable development (Routledge 2017), which explores how transitions away from carbon-based fuel sources to renewables occur in fourteen developing countries. His third book, Climate Actions: Transformative Mechanisms for Social Mobilisation (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), gives an overview of global climate change action and explores ways to mobilize groups and individuals to become more successful activists. In his newest book, titled Emancipatory Climate Actions: Strategies from histories (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), Delina offers strategies for strengthening climate change activism based on the mechanisms that made previous large-scale social movements successful.

Delina held a visiting fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School in 2013 and 2016, consulted for the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, Oxfam, and the University of Manchester, and worked as a development banker at Land Bank of the Philippines. He received a Rachel Carson Fellowship at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2017 and a Balik (Returning) Scientist at the University of the Philippines Diliman in 2019. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and a Master in Public Administration from Mindanao State University in General Santos City, Philippines, an MA in Development Studies from the University of Auckland, and a PhD from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.