Yifan (Flora) He 何一帆

I am an environmental politics scholar focusing on land and natural resource governance in the Global South. I combine rigorous causal inference methods, rich geospatial and remote sensing data, and in-depth qualitative interviews to advance knowledge in three areas: the distributive politics of environmental policy implementation; the social consequences of environmental degradation; and inclusive global conservation policy. My job market paper shows how politicians use deliberate non-enforcement of deforestation as a patronage tool to reward political supporters in Bolivia. I also study the unequal health impacts of gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon, and the environmental, health, and electoral consequences of a slash-and-burn policy in Bolivia. I have received research support from the NSF/APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the UCSB Chancellor’s Fellowship, and private foundations.

My research has been published in Science, One Earth, World Development, and Global Environmental Change, among others. I have served as a reviewer for various journals including Journal of Public Economics, World Development, Environmental Research Letters, Forest Policy and Economics, and Journal of Development Studies.

I am currently a PhD candidate at the Bren School, University of California, Santa Barbara. I received a Master of Science from the University of Michigan in 2017 and a Bachelor of Social Sciences from the University of Hong Kong in 2015. I speak Mandarin, Hakka, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. I have conducted fieldwork in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, China, Indonesia, and the US. I spend most of my free time wandering in nature looking for wildlife or dancing to Latin music.

You can find my latest CV here. To get in touch, please email yifan_he@bren.ucsb.edu.