Marion Dumas

Marion Dumas is an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute. Her research interests encompass 1) green innovation, 2) the institutional processes underpinning decarbonisation, and 3) the interaction between reducing inequality and fighting climate change.

Recent projects have been focused on green innovation. She has in particular been investigating the role of technological coordination in accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy. Using the case of the automotive industry, this work sheds light on the risk of coordination failures across countries’ policies, across the R&D investments of different players in the supply chain, and across interdependent technologies. Another strand of work investigates the impact of AI on the pace of green innovation. A third strand analyses when and how green products go from niche expensive goods to mainstream affordable goods. This brings in relief the role of inequality in hindering this process, and of standards in accelerating it.

Other projects focus on questions relevant to the “just transition”. As part of a new European consortium named AdJUST, Marion is leading work on the extent to which citizens’ and firms’ attitudes toward the transition are shaped by policies that can ease the impact of the transition. She is also leading work on assessing the capacity of institutions to implement decarbonisation policies.

Background

Marion is an environmental economist and political economist, also trained as an environmental scientist, broadly interested in how to reform both economic policies and institutions to contend with planetary boundaries.

She has previously done research on how environmental legal regimes develop, how they empower green constituencies and become capable of shaping the exercise of political power in a durable way.

Marion holds a B.Sc in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from MIT, a M.Sc in Environmental Sciences from the ETH Zurich, and a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University (during which she trained as an economist and political scientist). Before coming to LSE, Marion was an Omidyar postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.