Ongoing Research Projects

Establishing a Climate Policy Design Lab for Singapore and Southeast Asia

Grant Period : Apr 2026 - Mar 2029

Faculty : TAN-Soo Jie-Sheng

Southeast Asia faces acute climate risks alongside growing pressure to decarbonise while sustaining economic competitiveness. For Singapore, achieving net-zero emissions, strengthening climate resilience, and managing transition risks require policy tools that can evaluate mitigation, adaptation, and economic impacts in an integrated and forward-looking manner. Existing global climate-economy models typically aggregate Southeast Asia into broad regions, limiting their usefulness for Singapore’s urban, economic, and institutional context.

This project establishes CALM (Climate And Low-carbon Modelling)—a Climate-Policy Design Lab—aligned with the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2030 agenda under the Urban Solutions and Sustainability domain. CALM will develop the first Singapore-focused climate-policy computable general equilibrium model that jointly integrates mitigation policies, physical climate risks, adaptation strategies, and transition risks within a single analytical framework. The model will be grounded in a Social Accounting Matrix and linked to household, firm-level, and spatial climate-impact data, enabling distributional and sectoral analysis.

Beyond scientific contributions, CALM is designed as a policy lab, co-developing scenarios with government stakeholders and supporting real-world decision-making. By providing deployable, policy-ready insights on decarbonisation pathways, resilience investments, and just transition outcomes, the project strengthens Singapore’s climate-policy capacity while laying the foundation for a scalable regional research programme across Southeast Asia.

Digitalization’s Double Edge: Promise and Paradox in Public Service Delivery

Grant Period : Feb 2026 - Nov 2027

Faculty : PARK Jungyeon

This project addresses this gap by theorizing the recurrent tensions of digitalization, focusing on their effects on participation and inclusivity. Integrating insights from digital government, collaborative governance, and equity-justice literatures, we develop a framework that identifies key trade-offs and specifies the institutional, infrastructural, and sociocultural conditions under which they arise. In doing so, the project advances theoretical debates in public administration while equipping scholars and policymakers with an analytic vocabulary to diagnose and respond to the paradoxes of digital transformation.

Understanding Policy Changes and Applying Anticipatory Design to Improve Governance for Sustainable Forest-Risk Commodities

Grant Period : Jan 2026 - Feb 2029

Faculty : CASHORE, Benjamin William

To date, policymakers and stakeholders along the global supply chains of forest-risk commodities (FRCs) remain under-informed and ill-advised on suitable interventions to effectively and equitably govern FRCs. To address this gap, we propose a multi-country research, capacity building, and facilitation project, to generate actionable governance design insights for addressing challenges in the existing national and international governance of FRCs.

We seek to support the establishment of national and international “communities of practice” supporting sustainable FRCs by (i.) generating relevant scientific knowledge in support of innovations, coherence, and effective implementation of FRC governance, and (ii.) engaging major stakeholders in key producer and consumer countries in “anticipatory design” learning dialogues and workshops to spark, and travel, high-impact transnational policy pathways. Our international consortium consists of leading forest governance researchers who will cover key consumer and producer countries across Asia (China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Laos), Africa (Cameroon and Ghana), Europe, and the US.

Pathways to Sustainable Progress: Advancing Clean Energy and Green Development through Policy Diffusion in Southeast Asia

Grant Period : Sep 2025 - Aug 2026

Faculty : TAN-Soo Jie-Sheng

To advance sustainable development and clean energy adoption in Southeast Asia by creating a dedicated platform for research, learning, and collaboration that empowers regional policymakers to design and implement increasingly effective policies, fostering accelerated investment in renewable energy and decarbonization technologies.

Domestic Environmental and Climate Change Challenges in China and India: Economic Resilience, Policy Responses, and Societal Adaptation

Grant Period : Apr 2025 - Sep 2026

Faculty : TAN-Soo Jie-Sheng

Environmental and climate change pose critical challenges for China and India, the world’s two most populous and rapidly industrializing economies. Both nations experience severe environmental pressures—including air and water pollution, deforestation, and climate vulnerabilities—that threaten economic stability and social well-being.

This project examines the differing impacts of these pressures on China and India with a focus on three key dimensions: economic resilience, policy responses, and societal adaptation. By integrating a mixed-method approach that combines econometric modeling, spatial analysis, and policy evaluation, the study aims to provide robust empirical insights into the long-term consequences of climate change and to inform the design of sustainable policy interventions. The findings can significantly contribute to global climate governance debates and offer actionable recommendations for other developing nations facing similar environmental challenges.

The Environmental Determinants of Human Capital and Conflicts in Asia, Africa, and America

Grant Period : Feb 2025 - Jan 2028

Faculty : LIU Tong

This proposed study aims to examine the impact of the environment on human capital and conflicts in Asia, Africa, and America. Extreme temperatures and air pollution have been major threats to public health and the economy. A growing literature shows that exposure to environmental disamenities, such as heatwave, pollution, and abnormal rainfall, are associated with adverse health outcomes including morbidity, mortality, low birth weight, depression, and so on.

However, it remains difficult to causally identify such effects due to empirical challenges in data and methods, while existing studies only focus on several major developed and developing countries. Furthermore, implications from the human capital impacts of the environment receive little attention, such as migration and conflicts (McGuirk and Nunn, 2024). Evaluation of such impacts on a broader scale is crucial for external validity and policymaking.

This study will explore how ambient temperature and air pollution affect human capital, including health and cognition, as well as human conflicts in Asia, Africa, and America. We will use quasi-experimental methods and detailed individual-level data to pin down the effects of exposure to high temperature and air pollution. We hypothesize that extreme temperatures and air pollution will significantly cause losses in human capital and induce tension and conflicts both within and between regions. Our findings will provide useful policy implications for environment, health, and conflicts in developing countries with critical environmental challenges.

Examining the Ethics of Policy Experimentation and Design For ‘Just Transitions’: Levelling the Field

Grant Period : Feb 2025 - Nov 2026

Faculty : Sreeja NAIR

Governments worldwide are heavily investing in efforts towards low-carbon transitions, many of which will involve experimentation with new policy ideas. Given the differential impacts of climate change on the society, it is critical that these policy transitions are ‘just’ i.e. do not exclude or further marginalize communities that are already vulnerable and are driven by the principles of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Ethical considerations are however rarely operationalized in the modern frameworks of environmental, including climate policy design and are similarly underrepresented in the associated scholarship on the policy process.

Our project sets the following research question: How do ethical considerations influence policy experimentation and design for ‘just’ transitions? Using bibliometric analysis and comparative case analysis we will examine the role of issue framing, policy networks and evidence in enabling just transitions.

Sustainable AI: Assessing the Global Environmental Footprint of Data Centres

Grant Period : Feb 2025 - Feb 2027

Faculty : BA Yuhao

This study is specifically designed to examine the environmental and energy consumption impacts of AI on a global scale, with a particular focus on data centers. We aim to assess how data centers influence water and electricity usage where they are located. Additionally, we will investigate the effects of these facilities on air quality and carbon emissions. The research will also evaluate the effectiveness of current energy efficiency and environmental standards applied to data centers. By working on this project, we seek to address a critical gap in academic research and provide policymakers with empirical insights that can inform the development of more sustainable AG governance policies.

The insights derived from this project will serve as essential references for shaping future policies, enabling the development of strategies that effectively mitigate the negative externalities associated with AI. As a pioneering initiative in this field, this study not only establishes an empirical foundation for policymaking but also paves the way for subsequent research. Building upon the findings of this project, future studies could explore the equity implications of AI’s role in economic and climate transitions, assessing potential disparities in AI’s environmental impact across varies sectors, and synergies between addressing AI’s environmental impact and other forms of externalities.

Of Dragons and Roosters: Cultural Beliefs and Political Selection in Contemporary China

Grant Period : Jan 2024 - Dec 2026

Faculty : LIU Tong

We study an entirely new mechanism of political selection in modern societies: traditional beliefs. Our empirical setting is China, where past surveys find that more than 50% of the officials hold traditional (e.g., Fengshui) beliefs to varying degrees. With a novel dataset on Chinese officials, we test the argument that (1) political elites tend to select subordinates based on their birthdays, i.e., those that can bring the elites good luck, and that (2) once selected, these subordinates tend to receive more economic resources from the superiors. The research should garner broad interests from both social sciences and humanities.

Assessing the Economic Impacts of Climate Action on Singapore's Older Adults

Grant Period : Nov 2023 - May 2026

Faculty : BA Yuhao

This research aims to evaluate how older adults in Singapore perceive the impact of increasing carbon taxes on their energy consumption and overall well-being. It places a particular emphasis on understanding the distinct challenges faced by the older adults in the context of a changing climate. This project is designed to make valuable contributions to our theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented knowledge concerning Singapore's climate resilience within the framework of an aging society.

Policy Learning Dialogues for Accelerating Green Transitions: Enhancing Policy Design Capacity Building in Southeast Asia

Grant Period : Oct 2023 - Oct 2026

Faculty : TAN-Soo Jie-Sheng

This grant aims to support the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES, LKYSPP, NUS), to enhance climate policy discourse and planning in Southeast Asia by integrating and accelerating policy design capacity building. The institute's mission is to nuture the learning exercises and dialogues required for generating durable and effective climate and sustainability policy solutions in Asia. We offer this approach as a way to overcome existing and historical relationships among clearly articulated goals, well-intended policy interventions, and suboptimal impacts. We accomplish this task by proposing an interdisciplinary approach to policy design capacity building, which focuses on building necessary analytical, managerial, and technical policy capacity, to ameliorate climate-related policy challenges in Southeast Asia. Our approach is expected to enable policymakers to co-generate and exchange knowledge, share experiences, and develop insights, and through this process, identify novel policy design levers and policy pathways capable of meeting national climate goals. This approach will also identify key learning bottlenecks to which public and private funding could be targetted to alleviate, and to identify places of accelerated learning that might be diffused across ASEAN countries. These efforts, in turn, will generate efficient allocation of private and public funding for both enhancing effective policy desing capacity building, as well as achieving sustainability pathways toward desired outcomes, ranging from effective climate finance, to the acceleration of green technologies and associated skill training required to achieve just transitions.

Political Risks and Business-Government Relations in an Emerging Economy

Grant Period : Aug 2023 to Oct 2030

Faculty : LI Zeren

Businesspeople and politicians make strategic decisions based on risk assessment. While the existing literature primarily focuses on the economic outcomes of macro-level political risks, my research explores the incentives of politicians and firms to establish different forms of business-government relations under various risk conditions. For this research question, I use China as a case study of a dynamic risk environment, examining the conditions under which the party-state controls, cooperates with, or coerces firms, and the corresponding corporate political strategies. I document business-government relations through a mixed-method approach.

Specifically, I collect granular data on business-government interactions, such as revolving-door employment, official visits, equity structures, and records on procurement, subsidies, and taxation, complementing these with in-depth interviews and survey experiment. Using this abundant data, this research provides a micro-foundational understanding of business-government relations in a context of weak institutionalism.

A Grant for the Purpose of Conducting Policy-Relevant Research for PUB and Singapore

Grant Period : Apr 2023 to Mar 2028

Faculty : TAN-Soo Jie-Sheng

There are three themes under the potential deliverables for projects in the funding period of FY23 - FY27.

A: Water Demand Management:
1. Evaluate how attitudes towards climate change and the environment impact water use behaviour
2. Develop measures to increase awareness of how climate change impacts water sustainability and water use behaviour
3. Evaluate how developments and interventions impact water demand
4. Develop measures to reduce water demand

B: Environmental Sustainability:
1. Benchmark and develop measures to reduce PUB's carbon footprint
2. Evaluate the social and economic impacts of PUB's decarbonisation efforts (e.g. solar photovoltaic panels in reservoirs) and recommend engagement strategies to increase public receptiveness and strengthen engagements and partnerships with stakeholders.
3. Understand the impact of green procurement on the water industry

C: Best Practices in Water Management
1. Review the relevance of performance indicators used globally in the water sector
2. Explore global trends and innovations in water management

The Socioeconomic Impacts of Environmental Challenges and Policies in China

Grant Period : Dec 2022 - Nov 2026

Faculty : LIU Tong

Emerging economies face critical environmental challenges in economic development, but there is a lack of causal evidence on how they affect the economy and how policy instruments can address them effectively. The proposed study will evaluate the social costs of major environmental issues in China and explore policies to tackle these issues in three aspects. First, it will examine the impacts of anthropogenic pollution, climate change, and natural disasters on human capital and economic activities. On top of it, the study will continue to estimate the costs and benefits of environmental policies, including government regulation, incentive-based instruments, and information provision against environmental risks. Lastly, the study will further explore the determinants of environmental policies, including political economy and socioeconomic factors, in central and local governments in China. The research will provide novel and comprehensive evidence on these key questions, make important contributions to understanding the welfare implications of environmental policy and regulation, and offer useful insights into policymaking for sustainable development in China and other regions with similar issues.

Policy Experimentation for Addressing Complex Policy Challenges

Grant Period : Feb 2022 - Feb 2027

Faculty : Sreeja NAIR

Policy experimentation and piloting can play a key role in designing innovative solutions for complex environmental policy challenges of the 21st Century. Climate change, food security and water security are some prime examples of environmental policy problems that are complex i.e., involve multiple actors with multiple ideas and interests, operating across several institutional contexts and there is uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding the policy issue. While the potential of policy experimentation is recognized in theory in allowing for improved policy designs to address such complexity, there are challenges in the policy translation of these experiments in practice. The research under the start-up grant will explore factors and policy processes that influence translation of policy experiments to policy practice.

Policy experiments including pilots have also long been recognized as political, hence making a case for exploring the interplay between technical and political aspects of experimentation. This research can give insights to the question as to why policy experimentation is not seen more commonly, or why are not all policies launched as pilots? The research will draw recommendations for governments on ways to better engage actors and create effective avenues for improved design and deployment of policy experiments as well as effective utilization of their results.

Assessing Non-State Governance Involvement and Leadership in the Global Context

Grant Period : Dec 2021 - Nov 2026

Faculty : BA Yuhao

The proposed project aims at providing a comprehensive understanding of involvement and leadership of non-state actors in governance systems on a global scale. Such actors typically include businesses, civil society and nonprofits, and local and regional communities. Specifically, three central research questions will be answered: (1) To what extent are non-state actors involved in governance systems? (2) When and how do non-state actors provide governance leadership? (3) Why and how could non-state involvement and leadership affect governance outcomes? (4) How does non-state governance interact with the political and policy processes in varied contexts? Issus areas include climate change, sustainability, and the environment. Data collection will accommodate both developed and developing contexts.

Upon successfully answering these questions, the proposed project will make three contributions: (1) It will further our understanding of the role and suitability of non-state governance in the aforementioned issue areas. This is particularly important given the increasing challenges facing conventional state- centric arrangements; (2) It will equip scholars and policymakers with new evidence and research agendas in designing, implementing, and evaluating governance solutions. The varied contexts and methods likewise will offer comparative insights; (3) It will add to the school’s thought leadership in environmental and sustainability.

Credit Distribution and Political Connections: A Conjoint Experiment in China

Grant Period : Mar 2021 - Feb 2027

Faculty : LIU Yao, Adam

This project seeks to exploit the conjoint survey experiment technique to study the following question: Does having political connections help firms obtain bank credit in China, if so, what are the mechanisms? While there exists a large body of literature that studies this question in China and other countries, a fundamental inferential challenge remains, i.e., political connection isn’t randomly assigned. By setting this question up in a conjoint survey experimental with real bank officers in China, this study will be the first to provide micro-level causal evidence for this question. Both personal political connections (e.g., whether the hypothetical firm manager is a member of the local people’s congress) as well as institutional political connections (e.g., whether the firm is owned by varying levels of the state) will be randomized to gauge their influence on bank officer’s credit distribution decision.

Ongoing Research Projects

Policy Studies, Public Management and Governance