Spotlight - David G. Victor
(2009) Q&A with David G. Victor, Professor; Director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation
Professor David Victor joins IR/PS from Stanford University, where he served as a professor of law and as director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. As part of his exciting transition to UC San Diego, Victor will implement and direct the new Laboratory on International Law and Regulation with his wife, Professor Emilie Hafner-Burton, who has also recently joined the faculty of IR/PS.
What brought you to San Diego?
[Emilie Hafner-Burton and I] are both political scientists, and we study international relations and international political economy. San Diego is in the world league on that, and for us the opportunity to build the International Law and Regulation Laboratory together is terrific.
Tell us about your educational background before coming to San Diego.
I have an undergraduate degree in history and science from Harvard, and then I did a Ph.D. in political science at MIT. In the middle of my getting my Ph.D., I left MIT and went to Austria, where I ran a research group that worked on international environmental treaties, trying to understand what makes those effective. The lab that we’re building here at IR/PS is an effort to systematically look at the much larger question of what makes international law effective in a whole variety of issue areas.
What are some of your research interests, and what are you currently working on?
I’m interested in how regulation affects markets. Most of my research is on energy markets and on how regulation affects investment and business decisions in energy markets.
That regulation takes a lot of different forms. It can be in the form of environmental regulation – a lot of my work right now is on global warming, which is in some sense the most significant set of regulations to affect the energy industry for the foreseeable future. And my work in particular has been looking at how you could design much more effective international treaties than the Kyoto treaty. A lot of my research on environmental regulations has been around that issue [of how to approach climate change], of what and how you could do much better.
In addition to environmental regulation, I do a lot of work on corporate ownership and how it affects energy markets; in particular I’ve been looking at how ownership of oil companies and coal companies affects how the companies behave. [My research collaborators and I] have a huge book coming out next year on state-owned oil companies; it’s the largest systematic examination of how state-owned oil companies behave in the world oil market.
What are you looking forward to the most about your new position at IR/PS?
I’m looking forward to building the International Law and Regulation Lab. I think that the communities of legal scholars and political scientists have been dancing with each other around this question of how the law works for a long time. And I think we are now at the point where we can answer some of these questions systematically, with evidence, with much more robust theories, and that’s what I’m looking forward to working on.
How will you apply your experience and research to a new environment at UC San Diego?
One of the things we’re going to be to doing is creating a new course on international law and regulation, to give IR/PS students the chance to engage with these theories and their practical implications for the real world. For example, if you’re a policy maker in government -- how do you actually design treaties so they’re more effective? If you’re worried about global warming, how do you design treaties so that we don’t melt the planet? If you’re worried about arms control, how do you design treaties so that nuclear weapons material doesn’t slip into the wrong hands, even as more of it is used to generate more commercial nuclear power? Those are the kinds of practical applications of what we’re studying.
What classes are you teaching at IR/PS?
I’m teaching a new energy policy class this year. Next year [Professor Hafner-Burton and I] will teach a class on international law and regulation. Along the way, we will probably add a class on international environmental politics.
What do you like about teaching?
I like helping my students understand how to think about the world differently. The energy business and energy policies are filled with platitudes that have no connection to the real world, and those platitudes aren’t just innocuous newspaper articles; they are real policy. I use specific examples in my classes – such as the erroneous push of corn-based ethanol for liquid fuels – to help the students understand about political interests. Not just that policy is often designed to reward interest groups – everybody knows that. But you can actually predict which interest groups are going to be well-organized and successful in policy, and which won’t, and when successful groups will fail. We have a whole series of theories that help us [make those predictions], and one of the things I like is watching students grapple with the theories, and their strengths and weaknesses, and then apply them to the real world. And I think it makes them smarter about regulation and other forms of policy, because they understand better the political forces that structure how governments do what they do.
Most of the world’s energy industry is owned by governments, and the part that’s not actually directly owned is still heavily regulated. And I think if we can help students understand how regulation operates – how government decisions affect market structure, affect the ability of public and private firms to raise capital, the decisions they make about deploying capital – that that will allow our students to be smarter about opportunities in policy, and also more serious about the constraints.
Why did you decide to become a professor?
There aren’t many jobs that pay you think about how the world is organized, or that will give you the freedom to pursue ideas down avenues that often turn out to be rabbit holes. A few will turn out to be really interesting and will result in thinking about problems in a very different way. Most jobs won’t allow you to [explore like that]. This job is one of those jobs [that do].
I’ve made a big effort in my career as an academic to spend a significant fraction of my time with governments, NGOs, and especially companies, because you learn an enormous amount from them about the problems that they really worry about. And that then forces you as a scholar to be smarter about how what you study affects the real world. I’ll give an example:
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last two years with companies that are contemplating investing large amounts of money in installing what’s called carbon capture and storage. It’s a newfangled way to generate electricity using coal and put most of the pollution underground. So you can use coal—which is abundant, cheap, and politically very powerful—and generate electricity but not melt the planet at the same time. Technologically, this is an area of tremendous opportunity. But from the business perspective, this has been much harder for companies to engage with. And to understand the risks that companies are trying to manage—financial risks—has forced me as a scholar into a whole new area of research about how companies manage international regulatory risk.
Part of that [research] will be reflected in the laboratory – the laboratory is in part going to be looking at how the law affects how companies think about their regulatory risks. This is an old question in domestic politics – there are lots of people who study regulatory risk and political risk within countries. I think what’s different today is that for many issues there are now major international regulatory risks. And so, you’re sitting there from a company’s perspective and you’re looking at a landscape that’s constantly tilting and torquing and twisting, not only in its national domain, but also in the various ways that national policy is affected by international policy.
Is there life outside of academia for you?
[Emilie and I] have a sharp barrier between our private lives and our scholarly lives. On the other side of that barrier, first and foremost arrives a child, so that will be our focus. We spend a lot of time traveling; we try to go off the grid and see some place that’s unusual, so we can get a sense of what’s happening in other parts of the world that affects how people live. Two or three years ago we went to Madagascar for three weeks over the winter break, and the search for pristine forest in Madagascar – which is biologically one of the richest areas on the planet – the search for wilderness required heroic efforts. Once you got to Madagascar, which took 24 hours, you had to get on another plane and then ever smaller modes of transportation – puddle jumpers, puddle hoppers, to speedboats, to foot. And then finally after 48 hours of continuous travel, you end up in the most remote corner of the northeastern nook of the country of Madagascar in a place called the Masoala peninsula, where the largest areas of uninterrupted forest and the species that go with that sit. And the Masoala peninsula is protected not only because somebody drew a line around it and said “that’s protected,” it’s also protected because it’s very hard to get there.
It’s a reminder that in a lot of the world, regulation doesn’t work the way we think it works. When you show up in a remote corner of Madagascar – or in Borneo, where we spent many hours traveling through palm plantations or flying over palm plantations to go to these little islands of nature nestled among much larger islands of palm plantations – you see first hand what everybody is struggling to do, and how much further the planet has to go in devising better ways to protect nature.
For more information about David Victor's work and areas of expertise, please visit his website.
