Nives Dolšak is Associate Professor at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs (University of Washington Seattle campus) and School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (Bothell campus). She is also a Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She teaches courses in International Environmental Policy, Economic Development and the Environment, Energy Policy, Public Policy Process, and Policy Analysis and Program Evaluation. She received her Joint Ph.D. from School of Public & Environmental Affairs and the Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington.  

Her research examines institutional challenges in governing common pool resources at multiple levels of aggregation. She has co-edited two volumes. The first volume, “The Drama of the Commons”, was published under the aegis of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council’s Committee on Human Dimensions of Global Change.  This interdisciplinary volume reviews theoretical advancements in the study of common pool resources that have been made in the last 15 years and provides a fairly broad introduction to the field for readers unfamiliar with it and provocative research suggestions for researchers. The second volume,  “The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and Adaptation”, co-edited with Professor Elinor Ostrom, the MIT Press, analyzes new challenges that owners, managers, policy makers, and analysts face in managing natural commons, such as forests, water resources, and fisheries. 

Her other published work includes journal articles examining countries' response to mitigation of global climate change (Policy Studies Journal), implementation of climate change policy (Review of Policy Research), the impact of civil society in environmental policy in transitional economies (Voluntas), the role of adaptive management in global climate policy (Climatic Change), the link between donors' commercial interests and the location of environmental aid projects (Policy Sciences), the impact of voting in international environmental regimes on bilateral aid allocations (Global Environmental Politics), applicability of tradable permits in common-pool resource management (Review of Policy Research), factors impacting the choice of policy instruments (Administration and Society), and barriers for adoption of energy efficient technologies in transitional economies (World Resource Review). Her recent projects include: (1) how civil society affects environmental institutions and outcomes in Central and Eastern Europe; (2) collaborative management for salmon recovery in Washington and Oregon (with Sara Singleton and Mark Lubell) and (3) social indicators for integrated ecosystem assessment of Puget Sound and California Current (with Peneloppe Dalton, Phil Levine, and Karma Norman).

Professor Dolšak's recent research projects have been funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She is a faculty participant in an NSF IGERT project on Ocean Acidification. As per Google Scholar, her work has been cited over 1800 times.