Christian Elliott

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow

Biography

Christian Elliott is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University's Climate Solutions Lab. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto, where he held the SSHRC Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from 2020-2023. His research examines how the environmental impacts of market actors are governed beyond borders, especially for banks, insurance companies, and pensions.

Research

Christian researches how international organizations, states, firms, and non-governmental organizations govern markets and their environmental impacts transnationally. Substantively, he focuses on the governance of “sustainable finance,” i.e., the rules, standards, or policies reorienting the relationship between the financial sector and environmental issues like climate change. His work speaks to ongoing debates on the evolution of global governance, the relationship between international organizations and public policy, and the opportunities of and limits to non-state rulemaking.
In addition to a book project and a series of papers on why financial corporations join global environmental governance efforts and what the implications of that may be for politics and markets, Christian is commencing a project on the recent “ESG backlash” in the United States. This effort, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, principally examines the relationship between the domestic politicization of climate change and the ability of international organizations to orchestrate the governance of transnational market actors.

Publications