Daniel Fiorino

Director of the Center for Environmental Policy, American University School of Public Affairs
Daniel J. Fiorino is the Director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Distinguished Executive in Residence in the School of Public Affairs at American University. As faculty member in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, he teaches courses on environmental policy, energy and climate change, environmental sustainability, and public management.

Dan is the author or co-author of seven books and some fifty articles and book chapters. According to Google Scholar, his work has been cited some 4,000 times in the professional literature. His most recent books are A Good Life on a Finite Earth: The Political Economy of Green Growth (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Conceptual Innovation in Environmental Policy (with James Meadowcroft, MIT Press, 2017). MIT Press also published the second edition of Environmental Governance Reconsidered (with Robert F. Durant and Rosemary O’Leary) in 2017. His book, The New Environmental Regulation, won the Brownlow Award of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) for “excellence in public administration literature” in 2007. Altogether his publications have received nine national and international awards from the American Society for Public Administration, Policy Studies Organization, Academy of Management, and NAPA. His recent refereed journal articles were on the supply chain management as private sector regulation in Business Strategy and the Environment (2016, with Manjyot Bhan), the role of sustainability in governance in Public Administration Review (2010); explanations for differences in national environmental performance in Policy Sciences (2011); and innovation in renewable energy in Policy Studies Journal (2013).

Dan joined American University in 2009 after a career at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Among his positions at EPA were the Associate Director of the Office of Policy Analysis, Director of the Waste and Chemicals Policy Division, Senior Advisor to the Assistant Administrator for Policy, and the Director of the National Environmental Performance Track. The Performance Track program was selected as one of the top 50 innovations in American government 2006 and recognized by Administrator Christine Todd Whitman with an EPA Silver Medal in 2002. In 1993, he received EPA’s Lee M. Thomas Award for Management Excellence.

He has appeared on or been quoted in many media outlets: the Washington Post, Daily Beast, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Agence France-Presse, Marketplace and CCTV on such topics as air quality, climate change policy, the BP Horizon Oil Spill, carbon trading, EPA, the role of environmental issues in the 2016 election, and U.S. environmental and energy politics. In 2013, he created the William K. Reilly Fund for Environmental Governance and Leadership within the Center for Environmental Policy, working with associates of Mr. Reilly and several corporate and other sponsors. Dan is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. He often is invited to speak to government, business, and academic audiences. In the summer of 2013 he was named the Sir Frank Holmes Visiting Fellow in Public Policy at Victoria University in New Zealand.