Edmund Downie

Position
STEP PhD Student
Office
306 Robertson Hall
Bio/Description

Edmund Downie is a 3rd-year PhD student in Public Affairs in the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy program at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He studies how to build realistic and durable pathways for deep decarbonization in China, India, and the Global South. He uses tools from political science and energy-systems modeling and covers topics including political economy, just transitions, and climate finance. He is a co-author of the Guide to Chinese Climate Policy 2022 (Oxford Institute for Energy Studies) and has authored or co-authored peer-reviewed publications with CGEP, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), and the Made in China Journal. He has also written for the Washington PostForeign PolicyBarron’sThe Wire China, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, chinadialogue, and The Diplomat. He participates in a variety of Track II dialogues and subnational exchanges around US-China climate cooperation.

Before joining SPIA, Edmund was a non-resident fellow at the Columbia University SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) and a senior analyst at Analysis Group in Boston. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at Yunnan University in China (2017-18) and a Yale University Gordon Grand Fellow at the Center for Policy Research (Delhi) and the Center for Studies in International Relations and Development (Kolkata) (2014-15). He received an MPhil in International Relations at Nuffield College, Oxford as a Marshall Scholar (2017) and a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale University (2014).