Professor Dolšak is Associate Professor at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs (University of Washington Seattle campus) and the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (Bothell campus). 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.  She received a B.A. in Economics from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. As per Google Scholar, her work has been cited over 500 times.  

Her research examines institutional challenges in governing common pool resources at multiple levels of aggregation. Her doctoral dissertation, “Marketable Permits: Managing Local, Regional, and Global Commons”, analyzes the applicability of marketable permits for managing natural common-pool resources (CPRs) of various spatial extents.

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), 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 billateral 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, forthcoming), and barriers for adoption of energy efficient technologies in transitional economies (World Resource Review). She started a new project examining how civil society affects environmental institutions and outcomes in Central and Eastern Europe. In collaboration with Sara Singleton and Mark Lubell, she begun a project evaluating collaborative management for salmon recovery in WA, OR, and CA.