Scott Barrett

Scott Barrett is the Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural Resource Economics at Columbia University in New York City with appointments in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and the Earth Institute. He has also served as Vice Dean of SIPA—most recently, from 2018-2021.

His research develops a theory of international cooperation, mainly grounded in game theory and applied to global environmental and public health issues. His models explain critical features of treaties and customary law, and show what these institutions are and are not able to achieve. He uses this approach to propose ways in which international institutions could be designed to achieve greater success.

Before joining Columbia in 2009, he was Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he also directed the International Policy Program and the Global Health and Foreign Policy Initiative. From 1988 to 1999, he was Assistant and then Associate Professor of Economics at the London Business School, and Dean of the Executive MBA Program from 1992-1995. He has also been a visiting scholar/professor at École Polytechnique, Harvard, Princeton, Sciences Po’s Paris School of International Affairs, Yale, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin. From 2022 to 2025, he was Centennial (Visiting) Professor at the London School of Economics.

Among other current affiliations, he is a Fellow and former chairman of the advisory board of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

For his research, he has been awarded the Resources for the Future Dissertation Prize, the Erik Kempe Prize by the European Association of Environmental & Resource Economists, the Publication of Enduring Quality Award by the Association of Environmental & Resource Economists (AERE), and the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, by the University of Bath. In 2019 he was made an AERE Fellow. In 2024 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2025, he received the Ralph C. d’Arge and Allen V. Kneese Award for Outstanding Publication in 2024 in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. He has also received SIPA’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Among other publications, he is the author of dozens of journal articles and two books, Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making and Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods, both published by Oxford University Press.

He has played a number of roles in the policy arena, including as lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, senior lead advisor to the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, and member of the World Health Organization’s Strategic Advisory Group on malaria eradication. 

Scott Barrett received a B.S., summa cum laude, in Resource Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; a M.A. in Economics from the University of British Columbia; and a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics. He is a dual US-UK national and lives in Brooklyn and on Cape Cod.