Scholars@Duke
Kimberly Marion Suiseeya

Kimberly Marion Suiseeya

Associate Professor in the Division of Environmental Social Systems
Environmental Social Systems
k.suiseeya@duke.edu
Box 90328, Durham, NC 27708-0328
Grainger Hall 4117, 9 Circuit Drive, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours By appointment  

Selected Publications

Holistic, Literature-Informed Critical Mineral Life Cycle Assessment Guidelines: An Essential Foundation for the Energy Transition

Journal Article ACS Engineering Au · December 17, 2025 In this paper, we demonstrate that life cycle assessment (LCA) is a valuable tool for evaluating the trade-offs between critical mineral acquisition and its resulting environmental impacts, but the applications of LCA to critical mineral mining are inconsi ... Full text Open Access Cite

Makak: Co-designing Environmental Sensors to Protect Manoomin (Wild Rice)

Journal Article Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies · 2025 Manoomin, the Ojibwe word for Northern Wild Rice, is a culturally significant food source native to the Western Great Lakes region of North America. For generations, Manoomin stewardship has been central to Ojibwe culture and identity, harvested using trad ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Waking from Paralysis: Revitalizing Conceptions of Climate Knowledge and Justice for More Effective Climate Action

Journal Article Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · March 1, 2022 Despite decades of climate science research, existing climate actions have had limited impacts on mitigating climate change. Efforts to reduce emissions, for example, have yet to spur sufficient action to reduce the most severe effects of climate change. W ... Full text Cite

Navigating the spaces between human rights and justice: cultivating Indigenous representation in global environmental governance

Journal Article Journal of Peasant Studies · January 1, 2022 How and in what ways do ‘marginalized' actors influence global environmental governance? Through a collaborative event ethnography of the Paris Climate Summit (COP21), we examine power as it emerges through interactions between actors, institutions, and sp ... Full text Cite

Global environmental agreement-making: Upping the methodological and ethical stakes of studying negotiations

Journal Article Earth System Governance · December 1, 2021 This perspective identifies how recent advances contribute to re-evaluating and re-constructing global environmental negotiations as a research object by calling into question who constitutes an actor and what constitutes a site of agreement formation. Bui ... Full text Cite

Toward a relational approach in global climate governance: Exploring the role of trust

Journal Article Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change · July 1, 2021 What role does trust play in global climate governance? For decades, claims of mistrust and distrust have dominated climate change policy arenas: doubts about climate change science and disagreements over rights and responsibilities related to mitigation, ... Full text Cite

Doing feminist collaborative event ethnography

Journal Article Journal of Political Ecology · January 1, 2020 Feminist political ecologists have transformed mainstream political ecology since its inception. The foundational and current work of feminist political ecologists indicate that their field is attentive to the epistemological foundations of power, inequiti ... Full text Cite

Making influence visible: Innovating ethnography at the paris climate summit

Journal Article Global Environmental Politics · January 1, 2019 Although Indigenous Peoples make significant contributions to global environmental governance and were prominent actors at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, COP21, they remain largely invisible in conventional, mainstream, and academic accounts of COP21. In t ... Full text Cite

Contesting Justice in Global Forest Governance: The Promises and Pitfalls of REDD+

Journal Article Conservation and Society · April 1, 2017 For more than 30 years, diverse actors in global forest governance have sought to address the justice concerns of forest peoples - concerns about displacement, marginalisation, and loss of identity - related to forest interventions. Despite the mainstreami ... Full text Cite

Transforming justice in REDD+ through a politics of difference approach

Journal Article Forests · January 1, 2016 Since Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation "Plus" (REDD+) starting gaining traction in the UN climate negotiations in 2007, its architects and scholars have grappled with its community-level justice implications. On the one hand, supporters ... Full text Cite

Moments of influence in global environmental governance

Journal Article Environmental Politics · November 2, 2015 International environmental negotiations such as the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP10) are state-dominated, and their outcomes are highly publicized. Less transparent is the role of non-state delegates who eff ... Full text Cite

Negotiating the Nagoya Protocol: Indigenous demands for justice

Journal Article Global Environmental Politics · January 1, 2014 In October 2010, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization. One impetus behind the Nagoya Protocol was the mand ... Full text Cite

Methods and global environmental governance

Journal Article Annual Review of Environment and Resources · October 1, 2013 This review analyzes the methods being used and developed in global environmental governance (GEG), an applied field that employs insights and tools from a variety of disciplines both to understand pressing environmental problems and to determine how to ad ... Full text Cite

In pursuit of procedural justice: Lessons from an analysis of 56 forest carbon project designs

Journal Article Global Environmental Change · October 1, 2013 In an effort to reduce the potential for negative social impacts in forest carbon projects, private third-party actors such as the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Alliance (Alliance) have established certification schemes (e.g. standards) to ensure th ... Full text Cite