Charles Sabel

Charles Fredrick Sabel (born December 1, 1947) is an American academic and professor of Law and Social Science at the Columbia Law School. His research centers on public innovations, European Union governance, labor standards, economic development, and ultra-robust networks.

Biography Sabel attended Harvard University and earned a B.A. in Social Studies in 1969 and a Ph.D. in Government in 1978. He was a faculty member in the departments of Political Science and Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1977 and 1995. According to Sabel and Cohen, this decentralizes power allows problems to be solved locally. In addition, national governing bodies can also pool information and determine syntheses as to which regulatory approaches are working. which is a recurring theme in his scholarly work. He describes such disruptions saying, “What you do determines what I do, and vice versa. By the end of our collaboration, neither of us could have anticipated the result.”

Sabel received the honor of a Professorship through The Radboud Excellence Initiative at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Sabel was to begin his time in the Radboud Excellence Initiative in June 2015.

Publications Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World, Princeton University Press, 2022. Coauthored with David G. Victor.