Ronie-Richele Garcia-Johnson 1968-2003

Ronie-Richele Garcia-Johnson died on 15 April 2003 after a courageous fight against cancer. As her friends and colleagues mourn her passing, they also celebrate her joyous and productive life. Ronie's captivating and generous personality, coupled with her intellectual capacity and curiosity, distinguished her as an inspiring colleague, mentor and friend.

Born in Ventura, California, Ronie graduated with a double major from Harvard University in 1991. She received her doctorate in political science at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1998. As a graduate student, one mentor recalls, she had the kind of inquiring mind and breadth of interests that made it a pleasure serving on committees, reading drafts, and advising. And the speed with which she finished her coursework, secured funding, conducted field research and completed her dissertation amazed many.

At the time of her death, Ronie was an Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. Specializing in international environmental politics, Ronie brought valuable contributions to the faculty and students at Duke. The early success of her first book, Exporting Environmentalism: Multinational Firms in US, Mexico and Brazil, bespoke her talent for identifying fascinating environmental questions and tackling them insightfully and enthusiastically. Published in 2000 by MIT Press in the Global Environmental Accord series, the book examines the increasingly multifaceted role of multinational corporations in environmental politics. It is a thorough comparative analysis of the role of multinational interests in diffusing voluntary standards and as carriers of global influence in domestic environmental politics. For scholars undertaking similar intellectual pursuits, it was immediately obvious that Ronie had pinpointed a phenomenon of growing significance in international politics. The book's contribution to the study of international environmental politics was recognized by the International Studies Association in 2001 with the award of the prestigious Harold and Margaret Sprout Award.

Having made a notable mark in the study of business and civil society actors in global politics, Ronie's intellectual curiosity pushed her towards further exploration of the political strategies of transnational actors in a variety of contexts. She was deeply interested in the role of non-governmental actors such as scientists, indigenous peoples' coalitions, environmental advocates, criminal networks, and multinational firms, in influencing environmental decisions across borders. Exploring these actors' modes of collective action, the version of environmental ideas that they transmit across cultures, and their impacts on public policy and private behavior, she argued that the globalization of environmentalism is best understood at an intermediate level of analysis—above the level of the individual but below that of global civil society writ large. She was also interested in the interactions of governmental agents outside the bounds of traditional international environmental regimes. At the time of her death, she was involved in a project evaluating the cooperative efforts of Brazilian and US environmental agencies to promote pollution prevention programs.

Building on her analyses of voluntary environmental programs, in the three years before her death, Ronie focused considerable energy on understanding the emerging phenomenon of certification, in industries ranging from chemicals to coffee to automobiles. In a collaborative project sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Ronie considered why certification and other voluntary programs were emerging in so many sectors, and what impact these programs would have on the behavior of entire industries. Connecting these questions to her interest in transnational actors, she evaluated the participation of firms, non-governmental organizations, and governments in certification programs, building a powerful transactions-cost framework to explain the dynamics driving firms' decisions. She was poised to evaluate the effectiveness of voluntary approaches when she became ill. Ronie also planned to be part of a project investigating the role of multinational corporations across regions and the networked structure of their transnational political organizations. Though her death interrupted all of this research, the multiple intellectual agendas her work has set will continue to influence those seeking to unveil new phenomena in global environmental politics.

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