Tim Heinmiller

Associate Professor, specializing in Public Policy and Administration, Environmental Politics, and Research Methods

Phone: 905-688-5550 ext. 4232
E-mail: theinmiller@brocku.ca
PL347

Education

BA: Guelph, MA: Guelph, PhD: McMaster

Research Interests

The general focus of my research is environmental policy and natural resource management in developed countries.  Thus far, much of my research has focused on water policy in the Great Lakes and Prairie regions of North America and the Murray-Darling region of Australia.  Some of the publications derived from this research are listed below.

In 2008, I successfully applied for an SSHRC research grant to expand my work in these areas.  This project looks at the use of 'cap and trade' policies in the governance of environmental scarcity, in a variety of contexts.  There are two lines of investigation in this project:

The first line investigates the politics of protecting instream flows in advanced irrigation economies.  It examines why governments have historically failed to protect instream flows adequately and what new policies and policy instruments - including 'cap and trade' - have been introduced recently to rectify this problem.  This line of research is particularly important in light of increased water scarcity and variability due to overuse and climate change.

The second line investigates the origins and spread of economic policy instruments in the developed world.  This line of research will be important for understanding why different countries and sub-national jurisdictions have converged or diverged in their climate change policies, since climate change became a major political issue in the 1990s.
 

Awards and Honours

2004-05 - Held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Western Ontario

2008 - Awarded an SSHRC Standard Research Grant as the sole investigator for the project: 'Defining Limits: Politics, Vested Interests and Cap and Trade Resource Management Programs'

<b>How does political science relate to sustainability/ESRC?</b><br> The environment and environmental sustainability is inherently political. Social, cultural, and economic factors are all influential in determining a society’s propensity for sustainability, but, ultimately, a society’s choice to be sustainable (or not) occurs through political processes. Understanding these political processes, what factors shape these political processes, and how these political processes influence social decisions (such as government policy) is crucial to the study of the environment and environmental sustainability and Political Science provides a good entry point for such research.