Core Department Faculty Member

Danielle Falzon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University in 2022. Her work uses qualitative methods to examine spaces where decisions are being made on climate change.  Her research primarily analyzes on how power is embedded in fields and institutions such that they reproduce social inequalities and limit climate action, bringing together insights from environmental sociology, global and transnational sociology, the sociology of organizations, and critical development studies.

Her first book, Adaptation as Usual: How Global Norms Impede Climate Action in Bangladesh (under contract with Columbia University Press), elucidates the field of organizational actors involved in efforts to adapt communities to climate impacts in Bangladesh, and analyzes the implications of the norms and priorities that guide their efforts. In it, she argues that ideals, practices, and assumptions that come from modernization drive normative approaches to adaptation in ways that systematically limit adaptation’s effectiveness. While the “adaptation field” follows norms that secure the power of international-scale organizations to decide how adaptation will take place, local organizations and the local people that adaptation is meant to serve are marginalize in decision-making.

Danielle’s current work is focused on the UN climate negotiations, where she has multiple streams of research. Most recently, she has followed the process of developing of indicators for a “Global Goal on Adaptation,” examining interplay between politics and expertise in the process and elucidating how normal, practical decision-making in indicator development led to the reproduction of known shortcomings for metrics and measurement. She has also done work on obstruction in the climate negotiations, and co-chairs a working group on obstruction in the UNFCCC and IPCC through the Climate Social Science Network. Her second book project will assess the current crisis of institutional legitimacy in the UNFCCC, and will work to understand why so many actors continue to engage in the negotiations process. 

Danielle is affiliated with the International Centre for Climate Change (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh and the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN).