The Duck of Minerva

Josh Busby

Joshua Busby is a Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. From 2021-2023, he served as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense. His most recent book is States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge, 2023). He is also the author of Moral Movements and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2010) and the co-author, with Ethan Kapstein, of AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations (Cambridge, 2013). His main research interests include transnational advocacy and social movements, international security and climate change, global public health and HIV/ AIDS, energy and environmental policy, and U.S. foreign policy.

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Recent Posts

Welcome to the New Duck

by | 8 February, 2015 | ,

In advance of this year's ISA convention and the OAIS awards, we're happy to launch a new and improved Duck of Minerva with a revamped look and feel. You will notice automatically a direct link to duckofminerva.com which should make access more straightforward. The new site is also responsive so will resize automatically on your phone or tablet. We've also added a new set of topics to classify posts by subject so you can find them easily. The Twitter feed and blogroll have been updated.  We wanted to thank permanent contributors Robert Kelly and Vikash Yadav who have decided to step down. In...

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Should the United States Arm Ukraine?

Should the United States Arm Ukraine?

by | 6 February, 2015 |

With Russia's incursions into Ukraine becoming more aggressive, there has been a lot of chatter about whether or not the U.S. government should arm Ukraine with lethal weapons. Defense Secretary Nominee Ash Carter has signaled his openness to such a move. Ivo Daalder, Strobe Talbott, Steven Pifer, and collaborators have issued a call for such support. There has been push back from Sean Kay and Jeremy Shapiro, other establishment foreign policy types. (With Talbott, Shapiro, and other folks from Brookings weighing in on opposing sides, there has been interesting discussion of this being an...

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WHO is responsible for the failure on Ebola?

WHO is responsible for the failure on Ebola?

by | 22 January, 2015 |

Nathan Paxton has a provocative post on The Monkey Cage where he suggests, among other things that the World Health Organization (WHO) is not to blame for the Ebola crisis. Rather, he lays the blame squarely on donor countries. He rightly notes that the WHO's budget and staff was cut after the financial crisis, but I think he lets WHO off too lightly. With many ideas circulating about the future of the WHO in advance of the upcoming WHO Executive Board meeting beginning January 26th, understanding the various factors that contributed to the failed response to Ebola is all the more critical. ...

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Domestic Politics, Climate Change, and International Ambition

Domestic Politics, Climate Change, and International Ambition

by | 17 January, 2015 |

Last fall, I wrote about how the U.S. government was insisting that any climate mitigation commitments agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate negotiations be non-binding political pledges. I argued that was appropriate because the high bar for treaty ratification in the U.S. Senate made legally binding commitments unlikely. This kind of soft "pledge and review" approach to climate change first emerged at the 2009 Copenhagen negotiations, often derided by observers as an unsuccessful meeting. Quite the contrary, as I argued in a 2010 piece for the Council on Foreign Relations, Copenhagen...

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What's Happening with Climate Negotiations in Lima?

What's Happening with Climate Negotiations in Lima?

by | 13 December, 2014 |

The annual climate negotiations are wrapping up in Lima, Peru tonight or likely tomorrow. Negotiators are working through the night in overtime as they seek to hammer out a blueprint that will serve as the negotiating template for next year.  This is the meeting before next year's big meeting in Paris when expectations are high for a new climate agreement that will establish the targets and actions countries are willing to make for the 2020 period and beyond. So, what's going on? What's at stake? What are the key outcomes? Points of dissensus and consensus? Should we be optimistic or...

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World AIDS Day 2014: Five Data Points, Four News Items, and Three Films

World AIDS Day 2014: Five Data Points, Four News Items, and Three Films

by | 1 December, 2014 |

Today is World AIDS Day, an annual day of remembrance and reflection on the global AIDS crisis held since 1988. Overshadowed this year by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, we should keep in mind that this problem is not over even if it has receded from news coverage in recent years. Here are 5 facts and 4 news items about the state of the current epidemic to keep in mind, and 3 recent films - How to Survive a Plague, Fire in the Blood, and the Dallas Buyers Club, which help bring some context to understanding grassroots mobilization in the U.S. and internationally to combat the AIDS...

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Ebola is Not Over

Ebola is Not Over

by | 26 November, 2014 |

The Ebola crisis isn't over. In the absence of new infections in the United States, Americans have moved on to other preoccupations (Ferguson anyone?), but the problem hasn't gone away even if Google searches have plunged. There has been some positive news out of Liberia with a decline in the rate of new infections from 80 new cases per day to about 20 to 30, but the news from Sierra Leone suggests the problem is far from under control, with the end of the rainy season potentially making transit easier and facilitating the spread of the virus further. More troubling still is the new hot spot...

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Historic Bilateral Climate Agreement Between the US and China

Historic Bilateral Climate Agreement Between the US and China

by | 12 November, 2014 |

Here was my Tweet the other day. Today we have an answer. Tweeps, best case scenario on climate coming out of APEC? — Josh Busby (@busbyj2) November 7, 2014 If you went to bed early on Tuesday night, you might have missed some very big news out of Obama-Xi meeting in Beijing, other than announcements on trade and regional security. I'm talking about the potentially momentous bilateral agreement on climate change where China announced for the first time a date -- "around 2030" -- for peak greenhouse gas emissions and the United States announced a 2025 emissions reduction target. This is big...

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China Tries to Come to Grips with Pollution

China Tries to Come to Grips with Pollution

by | 5 November, 2014 |

In the lead up to the APEC summit about to start this week in Beijing, China’s leadership undertook a series of emergency measures to avoid the continued embarrassment of a string of poor air quality days that had bedeviled the country over the previous year. The government reinstated the familiar practice of restricting car travel to certain days of the week based on license plate numbers. Government workers and schools were closed for an “APEC holiday” to reduce traffic. Factories have been ordered to shut down during the summit. Interestingly, those plans seemingly backfired as companies...

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Advice for a Junior Colleague

Advice for a Junior Colleague

by | 2 November, 2014 |

What kinds of advice do you give junior colleagues early on as they think about what it takes to get tenure and promotion? With some new colleagues, I've been giving that some thought based on my own pretty recent experience. Obviously, some guidance is institution-specific, and I have a fairly idiosyncratic circumstance in a policy school. Nonetheless, I think there may be some generalizable lessons, with the focus here on research. Where Are You Thinking of Publishing? Some schools have point systems for particular journals. Some have informal guidance about what journals matter.  If you...

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