FACULTY RESEARCH EXPERTISE
Environmental Policy and Social Sciences
PhD University of Maryland, Environmental Policy
MS University of Maryland, Conservation Biology
MA SUNY-Albany, Education
Research Focus: Environmental Policy and Social Sciences
Web Site: http://classweb.gmu.edu/pbalint/
Office: Rob A 223
Phone: 703-993-1404
Email: Click Here
Peter Balint teaches courses on environmental policy and on research methods and data analysis. For the past decade, his primary research focus has been on community-based natural resource management. This is a policy approach designed to integrate conservation and community development in rural areas of poor countries. He has conducted research on this topic in Central America, Central Asia, and Eastern and Southern Africa. In a second research focus, he has explored so-called wicked environmental problems. These are large-scale, long-term policy dilemmas in which multiple and compounding risks and uncertainties combine with sharply divergent public values to generate contentious political stalemates. In particular, he and several colleagues studied the US Forest Service’s ongoing struggle to develop a broadly acceptable management plan for Sierra Nevada region of California. Peter Balint has also recently begun a new line of research on the bureaucratic lifecycles of US environmental agencies.
Before entering the University of Maryland in 1996 to study environmental issues, he also taught English for more than 20 years in the inner-city alternative public high schools of Albany, NY.