Gus Greenstein
Assistant professor
- Name
- Dr. G.H. Greenstein
- Telephone
- 070 8009500
- g.h.greenstein@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0002-7542-9026
Gus Greenstein is an assistant professor at the Institute of Public Administration.
More information about Gus Greenstein
Personal website
Gus Greenstein is a political scientist specialising in environmental governance, public administration and policy studies. He received his PhD from Stanford University’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources.
Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, he studies policy implementation and institutional change in the context of environmental and climate policy and international development. His work on policy implementation examines how organisational structure and management practices affect the outputs and performance of public agencies, as well as the factors that shape agency structure and management. His work on institutional change explores the drivers of environmental policy change in national and subnational governments and international development organisations.
His completed and ongoing projects address these themes in the context of deforestation control in Brazil, forest regulations in global comparative perspective, World Bank environmental policy, and the allocation of development finance in USAID, among other areas.
He currently serves on the Steering Committee of the European Consortium for Political Research ECPR Standing Group on Environmental Politics. He is a Research Fellow of the Earth System Governance Project and a former Research Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies SAIS, Johns Hopkins University.
Outside academia, he has consulted for the World Bank Environment Practice, the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group, and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency PBL. He has worked as a Research Analyst for The Brattle Group, an energy economics consulting firm, International Rivers, and Conservation Strategy Fund. As a Thomas Watson Fellow, he spent a year documenting the social and environmental impacts of large hydropower projects across South and Southeast Asia, sub Saharan Africa, and Latin America.
He holds an MPhil in Development Studies from Oxford and a BA in Environmental Studies from Amherst College.
Assistant professor
- Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs
- Institute of Public Administration
- Public Policy and Innovation
- Greenstein G.H. (2025), Staff (mis)allocation in public agencies: evidence from protected area management in Brazil, Working Papers on SSRN : 1-10.
- Greenstein G.H. (13 February 2025), Reallocating staff can help reduce Amazon deforestation in Brazil. LSE Business Review. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. [blog entry].
- Greenstein G.H. (2025), Bureaucratic autonomy in environmental governance. Social Science Research Network. [other].
- Greenstein G.H. (2025), Staff (mis)allocation in public agencies: evidence from protected area management in Brazil, Public Management Review : 1-27.
- Greenstein G.H. & Heinzel M. (2025), Bureaucratic politics and aid allocation: evidence from the US agency for international development, Regulation & Governance : 1-14 (rego.70106).
- Greenstein G.H. & Honig D. (2024), Managing aid personnel. In: Desai R.M., Shantayanan D. & Tobin J.L. (Eds.), Handbook of aid and development. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
- Greenstein G.H. (2023), How personnel allocation affects performance: evidence from Brazil's federal protected areas agency, Public Administration 102(3): 860-896.
- Greenstein G.H. (2022), The influence of alternative development finance on the world bank’s safeguards regime, Global Environmental Politics 22(3): 171-193.
- Aghumian A., Goller E., Dani A., Greenstein G.H, Kavalsky B., Payton J., Ramirez-Rodriguez S. & Weng A. (2022), Enhancing the effectiveness of the world bank’s global footprint. Washington: Independent Evaluation Group.
- Hledik R. & Greenstein G.H. (2016), The distributional impacts of residential demand charges, The Electricity Journal 29(6): 33-41.