Javiera Barandiarán is Associate Professor in the Global Studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Barandiarán received her Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of California, Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy and Management. She holds a Masters in Public Policy also from Berkeley and received her B.A. in politics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research has been awarded support from the National Science Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

Barandiarán works on environmental politics, experts and the state in Latin America, to understand how states come to know about the environment in order to regulate it. Her teaching interests include development and environment, democratic institutions and states in transition, the politics of knowledge production and science, and innovation and environmental policies. Prior to her Ph.D., Barandiarán conducted surveys on attitudes towards science, technology and the environment in European countries. She has also worked in or conducted research on questions of rural development in Hawai’i, Mexico and California.