Ruth Greenspan Bell
Bell is a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and the co-leader with Elke Weber of a program to harvest insights from behavioral social science research to motivate a variety of behavior changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and impact climate challenge. Her previous positions include Senior Fellow and Director of the US Climate Policy Objective at World Resources Institute (WRI); directing International Institutional Development and Environmental Assistance (IIDEA) at Resources for the Future (a program to build more effective systems of environmental protection globally, producing, for example, a highly acclaimed study of the policy process and changes –including the switch of all commercial vehicles from petrol and diesel to CNG -- that led to improvements in air quality in Delhi); Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs; and before that, various domestic management positions in U.S.
EPA's Office of General Counsel. Bell publishes extensively about climate change and other environmental issues, addressing a wide range of policy and environmental audiences (Foreign Affairs, Issues in Science and Technology, Environmental Forum, Environmental Law Reporter, Environment, and Harvard International Review among them). Bell is a graduate of UCLA and the School of Law of the University of California at Berkeley; serves on several boards (currently the International Senior Lawyers Project and The Mountain Institute) and is a long-standing member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Current Research
Sustainability Utilizing Social Science Theory: An Interdisciplinary Network
SUSSTAIN was founded by Elke Weber and Ruth Greenspan Bell in 2011. NSF provided core funding for SUSSTAIN, recognizing that the successful adoption of new energy technologies has a large human component beyond mere installation of physical equipment. SUSSTAIN seeks to demonstrate how insights from the behavioral and social sciences can be put to work on energy consumption challenges in real-world applications and to disseminate that learning and experience into the research, policy, and business communities in order to facilitate progress toward energy efficiency. Ultimately the policy objectives coalesce around climate change.
SUSSTAIN is an interdisciplinary, multi-institution network with diverse analytic skills. Researchers in the current network include specialists in the social sciences, law, policy and business from Columbia, Vanderbilt, Washington State and Clemson Universities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Ultimately, SUSSTAIN seeks to expand its scope through partnerships, contributing its vision, scholarly leadership, unique policy outreach capabilities, and strong project management.
To date SUSSTAIN has assembled an analytic network, established partnerships with Avista, the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, and the Department of Defense. Its progress has largely featured the initiation of demonstration projects in the domains of energy efficiency and infrastructure. It has multiple SUSSTAIN-assisted research projects underway at partner institutions including Washington State University, Vanderbilt University, and Clemson University. These projects include historical analysis papers, lab experiments, and online survey-based research.