Dr. Daniel Fiorino

Daniel J. Fiorino is the founding Director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Distinguished Executive in Residence in the School of Public Affairs at American University. A faculty member in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, he teaches environmental policy, energy and climate change, environmental sustainability, and public management.

Dan is the author or co-author of seven books and some 60 articles and book chapters. According to Google Scholar, his work is cited some 5.300 times in the professional literature. His recent books are A Good Life on a Finite Earth: The Political Economy of Green Growth (Oxford University Press, 2018), Can Democracy Handle Climate Change? (Polity Books, 2018), and Conceptual Innovation in Environmental Policy (with James Meadowcroft, MIT Press, 2017). MIT Press also published the second edition of Environmental Governance Reconsidered (with Robert F. Durant and Rosemary O’Leary) in 2017.

The New Environmental Regulation won the Brownlow Award of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) for “excellence in public administration literature” in 2007. Altogether his publications have received ten national and international awards from the American Society for Public Administration, International Political Science Association, Policy Studies Organization, Academy of Management, and NAPA. In 2019, A Good Life on a Finite Earth received the Levine Prize of the International Political Science Association for best book in comparative public policy published in 2018.

Dan joined American University in 2009 after a career at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Among his positions were the Associate Director of the Office of Policy Analysis, Director of the Waste and Chemicals Policy Division, Senior Advisor to the Assistant Administrator for Policy, and Director of the National Environmental Performance Track. The Performance Track program was selected as one of the top 50 innovations in American government 2006 and recognized by Administrator Christine Todd Whitman with an EPA Silver Medal in 2002. In 1993, he received EPA’s Lee M. Thomas Award for Management Excellence.

He has appeared on or been quoted in many media outlets: the Washington Post, Daily Beast, Newsweek, BBC America, Christian Science Monitor, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Agence France-Presse, Marketplace, and CCTV on such topics as air quality, climate change policy, the BP Horizon Oil Spill, carbon trading, EPA, the role of environmental issues in the 2016 election, and U.S. environmental and energy politics.

In 2013, he created the William K. Reilly Fund for Environmental Governance and Leadership within the Center for Environmental Policy, working with associates of Mr. Reilly and several corporate and other sponsors. An elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, Dan was the Sir Frank Holmes Visiting Fellow in Public Policy at Victoria University in New Zealand during the summer of 2013.