Education

Ph.D. Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, 2026

M.A. Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, 2022

Thesis: Thirty Years On: Planetary Climate Planning and the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee of the UNFCCC

B.A. Geography (Individualized), New York University, 2020

Research

Political geography; global climate politics; multilevel climate governance; climate urbanism; urban political ecology; ecologically unequal exchange; degrowth; climate justice

My research comes in the wake of decades of scientific consensus on climate change that have not reconciled the institutional and political conditions through which response is organized. I turn away from the promise of better data or simply “following the science” to understand how climate governance is structured and executed, and how climate institutions authorize knowledge, distribute responsibility, and translate planetary imperatives into practice. My research agenda broadly traces the institutional life of climate governance: how bureaucratic, epistemic, material, and social processes shape the everyday organization of climate action across scales. I approach climate planning as a profoundly spatial and institutional process: technologies, networks, and regulatory systems are reorganized through political struggles, organizational practices, and shifting norms, and these dynamics reproduce or challenge inequalities.

This perspective guides three interconnected projects: 1) an ethnographic study of urban climate governance in California, tracing how policy actors, bureaucracies, and social movements imagine and build low-carbon futures in a fragmented, fossil-urbanized landscape; 2) an investigation of how sovereignty, state capacity, and institutional authority shape climate governance in contested political environments; and 3) an historical and institutional analysis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, showing how global climate governance emerged from competing political-economic visions of development, equity, and responsibility.

Selected Publications

Weinger, B.K. 2026. Overcoming the implementation gap: Everyday barriers and enablers of urban climate governance. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 8: 1-17. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2026.1656615.

Weinger, B.K. 2025. Institutionalizing global climate governance: Expertise, sovereignty, and scalar mismatch. Environmental Development 55: 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2025.101236.

Weinger, B.K. 2024. When the world collapses in Palestine. Jerusalem Quarterly 99: 85-100. https://doi.org/10.70190/jq.i99.p85.

Weinger, B.K. 2023. Thirty years on: Planetary climate planning and the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee. Global Environmental Change 80: 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102669.

Weinger, B.K. 2021. Scripting climate futures: The geographical assumptions of climate planning. Political Geography 88: 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102409.

Weinger, B.K. 2021. The COVID-climate moment: Approximating planetary crisis in Palestine/Israel. Antipode. https://antipodeonline.org/2021/02/05/the-covid-climate-moment-in-palestine-israel/.

Arefin, M.R., & B.K. Weinger. 2020. Infrastructural occupations: Waste and electricity in Palestine. Cultural Geographies 28(3): 569-572. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474020978487.

Grants & Awards

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2020-2025)

UCHRI Dissertation Grant (2025)

AAG Political Geography Specialty Group Graduate Student Paper Award (2024)

AAG Climate Specialty Group Graduate Student Paper Award (2022)

Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (2021, 2022)

Advisors

John Agnew (chair)

Stephanie Pincetl

Kelly Kay

Shaina Potts