Dr. Sikina Jinnah is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and an affiliated graduate faculty of Politics at University of California at Santa Cruz. She is also an 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and an affiliated faculty member at American University's School of International Service.

Her research focuses on the shifting locations of power and influence in global environmental governance, and in particular the role of transnational actors in environmental decision-making. Her most recent projects examine how key norms in global climate politics shape power relations, the role of U.S. preferential trade agreements in shaping environmental policy in trading partner nations, and the politics of climate engineering governance.

Her first book ("Post-treaty Politics: Secretariat Influence in Global Environmental Governance," MIT Press 2014) received the 2016 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for best book in international environmental affairs from the International Studies Association. The book examines the role of international bureaucracies in managing the politics of overlapping international regimes in the areas of biodiversity, climate change and international trade. Her second book (with Simon Nicholson), "New Earth Politics: Essays from the Anthropocene" (MIT Press 2016) engages leading scholars in a discussion over the role of global environmental politics in the age of the Anthropocene. Her forthcoming book, "Greening through Trade" (MIT 2020) examines the role of US preferential trade agreements in influencing environmental politics abroad. She also has a textbook entitled, "Global Environmental Politics: Understanding the Governance of the Earth" forthcoming in 2019 with Oxford University Press.

Dr. Jinnah's research has also been published in several scholarly journals, including: Global Environmental Politics, Global Governance, International Studies Review, Environmental Politics, the Journal of Environment and Development, Environmental Research Letters, Berkeley Journal of International Law Publicist, Climate Policy, Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, and Science.

Jinnah currently serves on the editorial board for the journal Global Environmental Politics, is co-editor of Environmental Politics, is a Senior Research Fellow with the Earth System Governance project, and sits on the Board of Advisors of the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment's (FCEA). Jinnah also co-edits an MIT Press book series (with Simon Nicholson), called One Planet.

Prior to coming to UCSC Jinnah was an Assistant and Associate Professor of International Relations at American University's School of International Service. She held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies and was also a consultant for the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), where she reported on CITES and UNFCCC processes for IISD's Earth Negotiations Bulletin.