David L. Downie

David Leonard Downie (born 1961) is an American scholar focusing on international environmental politics and policy. He currently writes and teaches at Fairfield University.

Downie's research focuses on factors that can promote or impede the creation, implementation and effectiveness of international environmental policy. This includes frameworks of scientific knowledge, patterns of economic interests, extant institutions and regime development as well as obstacles that stem from: the structures and interaction of the international political, legal, ecological and economic systems; common procedures employed in environmental policy making; characteristics of international environmental issues themselves; and the need to implement and fund internationally developed rules, norms and policies on the national and local level.

His research also examines global efforts to prevent stratospheric ozone depletion, address global climate change[1], and restrict anthropogenic emissions of mercury and of toxic chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). He has attended dozens of global negotiations on these topics. At many of the meetings associated with the ozone layer [2], mercury [3] and POPs,[4], he worked with the Secretariat as part of the team that drafted the official negotiation reports. For his informal work with the Ozone Secretariat at negotiations in the mid-to-late 1990s and his scholarly writing on global ozone policy from 1993-2014, he was nominated and awarded inclusion in the Montreal Protocol Who’s Who, a collection maintained by the United Nations Environment Programme’s OzonAction unit, “intended to honor the visionaries, innovators, and implementers who are making the Montreal Protocol a global environmental success story.” Downie has also been a long-time advocate of examining opportunities to reduce state, national and international taxes and fees focused on income, especially those paid by the lower and middle classes, and replacing them with taxes on pollution. The author of numerous publications on a variety of topics, his co-authored book, Global Environmental Politics [6], written with Professor Pamela Chasek (a co-creator of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin), is one of the most widely used in the field.

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