Fatiq Nadeem

Welcome! I am an environmental economist at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. I am on the 2026-2027 Job Market.

I study why environmental policies struggle to deliver across the developing world. Regulation has grown steadily stricter over two decades, yet the fires, deforestation, and pollution those rules target have not declined. I trace the alternative institutions that step in when the state cannot deliver, the ways people respond when no one can be held responsible, and the costs those failures impose on the state’s own institutions. I then build what each failure shows a government needs, constructing the measurement, the instruments, and the partnerships that put enforcement on evidence rather than statute alone.

I combine environmental economics, causal inference, and remote sensing, and I carry out most of my research in partnership with local institutions, including as an invited member of the Punjab Climate Observatory. My work has been published in The Economic Journal, Science, and Energy Policy, and my research has drawn more than $200,000 in competitive funding from the World Bank, the International Growth Centre, the Schmidt Family Foundation, J-PAL, and Google Cloud.

Previously, I was a Robert S. McNamara Research Fellow at the Development Research Group at the World Bank and a Pre-Doc at Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP), UCLA. I hold a BSc. (Honors) in Economics from Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan.