Walter F. Baber holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina and the J.D. from the University of San Diego. He is a professor in the Environmental Sciences and Policy Program and the Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at California State University, Long Beach. He is also an Associate of the Center for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra, a member of the Lead Faculty Group of the Amsterdam-based Earth System Governance Project.
Baber was the 2009 Fulbright Distinguished Chair of Environmental Policy at the Politenco di Torino. He was also a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of the Social Sciences at Australian National University in 2012. In 2016 he was the Fulbright Visiting Professor of Political Science at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. More recently, he has served as the 2017/18 Fulbright Distinguished Chair of Public International Law at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and the Faculty of Law at Lund University, Sweden.
His long-term research focuses on the normative dimensions of environmental governance, with a special emphasis on the urban context. Baber has spent more than a decade exploring the topic of deliberative democracy and its potential to address normative issues of environmental protection. This effort has led to the publication of numerous articles and, in late 2005, a book from the MIT Press. A second project involved a book-length extension of his previous discussion of deliberative democracy into the area of global environmental governance. This second book appeared in late 2009, again with MIT Press. Entitled Global Democracy and Sustainable Jurisprudence: Deliberative Environmental Law, this more recent volume won the 2011 International Studies Association’s book award for international ethics. Both of these volumes were co-authored with Dr. Robert Bartlett, Gund Chair of Liberal Studies at the University of Vermont.
In 2015, Baber and Bartlett published their third jointly authored book (again by MIT Press). This new volume is entitled Consensus and Global Environmental Governance: Deliberative Democracy in Nature’s Regime. A fourth volume in this series has been contracted for publication by Cambridge University Press under the title Environmental Rights in Earth System Governance: Democracy Beyond Democracy. This new volume is a product of Baber’s more recent interest in human environmental rights and environmental constitutionalism.