Hello!
I’m Dr. E. Keith Smith, a Senior Researcher (Oberassistent) at the Chair of International Political Economy and Environmental Politics at ETH Zürich. I study how we can identify and implement feasible, effective solutions to urgent environmental challenges.
My research explores how governance shapes environmental outcomes, economic development, political feasibility, and social equity, often adopting a global and comparative perspective. I work across a wide range of issues, including air pollution, climate change, energy transitions, and sustainable mobility. My approach is interdisciplinary, combining diverse theoretical frameworks with innovative, mixed-methods research designs.
My recent work has appeared in journals such as PNAS, Nature Communications, Nature Climate Change, and Nature Sustainability, with emphasis on topics such as the political feasibility of climate policy, air pollution in developing countries, political polarisation, sustainable supply chain governance, and social tipping dynamics.
News and Announcements
March 2026 – Climate policy feasibility across Europe relies on the conditional middle – Climate politics sounds increasingly polarised. But in Europe, support for climate isn’t driven by die-hard supporters or opponents. It tends to be shaped by a large “conditional middle” (33%). Our paper identifying the conditional middle was released today in Nature Climate Change (link). The paper was also featured in ETH News Also, an article on these finding in ETH News, as well as a blog on the CAPABLE project website. Many thanks again to all of the amazing colleagues in the Capable project!
December 2025 – Who really determines majority support for climate policies in Europe? – Our paper “Climate Policy Feasibility across Europe Relies on the Conditional Middle” has been accepted in principle at Nature Climate Change (pre-print). This paper identifies a crucial group of Europeans, the Conditional Middle, those who neither always in support for in opposition to climate policies, and whose views vary substantially by policy design. We estimate that the Conditional Middle constitutes about 1/3rd of citizens around Europe, and identify how preferences within this group are often the crucial determinant for whether a climate policy has majority support, or not. This paper is the flagship finding from our part of the Horizon EU-project Capable (WP2), focusing on surveys and experiments to identify European attitudes to climate change in 2025 and 2025 (survey data applet).
December 2025 – WU Best Paper Award – Our paper “Stringent sustainability regulations for global supply chains are supported across middle-income democracies” has won the “WU Best Paper Award” awarded by the Vienna University for Economics and Business in the category “Business Communication, Legal Studies, Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary Work and Economic Geography”. Super congrats to my co-authors Dennis Kolcava and Thomas Bernauer!
Oct 2025 – What drives views on sustainable supply chain regulations? Our paper “Voter perceptions and the politics of hidden costs in unilateral sustainable supply chain regulations” was just published in the European Journal of Political Research (open access). We explore how information disclosure rules enable governments to implement market access restrictions compliant with binding trade liberalisation commitments while (a priori) obscuring their costs to voters – thus providing a potentially effective and feasible avenue towards global supply chain regulations. This is the third in a package of papers with Dennis Kolcava and Thomas Bernauer, focusing on the cross-national demand for supply chain governance across the OECD (Nature Sustainability, link), and middle-income economies (Nature Communications, open access).