Michele M. Betsill

Michele Betsill is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science at Colorado State University, where she has also been the chair of the department. She studies climate change and sustainability policies, with a particular focus on how non-governmental actors and sub-national governments respond to climate change. She was a co-founder of the Earth System Governance Project in 2009.

Education and early work Betsill graduated from DePauw University in 1989, with a BA in French and communication. She then obtained an MA in international studies from the University of Denver in 1991. Betsill's dissertation, called Greens in the Greenhouse: Environmental NGOs, Norms, and the Politics of Global Climate Change, received the 2002 award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Transformational and Ecological Politics from the American Political Science Association.

During the 1999–2000 academic year, Betsill was a post-doctoral fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and in 2000 she became a professor of political science at Colorado State University. Betsill and Bulkeley argued that attempts to understand the implementation of climate change policies had been limited by a focus on national governments, but that meaningful policies could also be implemented at the level of city governments or non-governmental organizations, both within and across national borders and potentially without the participation of other levels of government. Focusing on the Cities for Climate Protection program and five case studies of specific cities, Betsill and Bulkeley investigate why it is difficult for networks of cities to implement meaningful sustainability policies in the context of urban planning. Abby Lindsay Ostovar situated this attempt to "analyze the evolution, constitution, and meaning of the emergent system of cross-border efforts between state and nonstate actors to address climate change" in the context that state-led efforts to combat climate change have not yet been effective, prompting voluntary initiatives to attempt to fill the gap, but with as-yet unknown results.

In 2008, Betsill co-founded the Earth System Governance Project, which became the world's largest network of environmental political scientists. In 2015, Betsill became the chair of the political science department at Colorado State University.

A 2019 citation analysis by the political scientists Hannah June Kim and Bernard Grofman listed Betsill as one of the most cited political scientists working at an American university in 2 different categories: the top 40 most cited women scholars, and the top 25 most cited political scientists who earned their PhD between 2000 and 2004 (inclusive). Foreign Affairs, and Times Higher Education.

Selected work Cities and Climate Change: Urban Sustainability and Global Environmental Governance, with Harriet Bulkeley (2003) "Rethinking sustainable cities: Multilevel governance and the 'urban' politics of climate change", Environmental politics, with Harriet Bulkeley (2005) Transnational Climate Change Governance, coauthored with other members of the Leverhulme Network on Transnational Climate Governance (2014)