About

Darin Christensen is an Associate Professor at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, serving as a courtesy faculty member in the UCLA Political Science Department. His academic work focuses on political economy, specifically on institutions and policies that promote investment and mitigate violence in developing countries. His research areas include regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where he studies the impact of institutional frameworks on economic development and stability.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Public relations
• Computer Science
• Knowledge management
• Medicine
• Business
• Environmental health
• Socioeconomics
• Economics
• Process management
• Environmental resource management
• Nursing
• Monetary economics
• Economic growth
• Geography
• Market economy

Selected publications

• The Point of Attack: Where and Why Does Oil Cause Armed Conflict in Africa?

  The Journal of Politics · 2026-04-20

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Interest-Based Negotiation over Natural Resources: Experimental Evidence from Liberia

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2025-10-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We experimentally evaluate whether an interest-based negotiation training for community leaders in Liberia improves their ability to strike beneficial deals related to their land and forests. We use environmental assessments, lab-in-the-field, and surveys and find that trainees are 27% more likely to reach a beneficial agreement, and it raises the total surplus earned by $2.74 USD, which is a 42% increase. Our exploration of mechanisms indicates that the training increases trainees’ capacity to identify valuable deals, but does not improve their appraisal of their outside option. We find a reduction (0.27 standard deviations) in the exploitation of communal forestland in treated communities.

  PublisherDOI

• Estimating the Footprint of Artisanal Mining in Africa

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-04-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Targeting Incentives for Environmental Stewardship (TIES)

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-09-04

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Estimating the Footprint of Artisanal Mining in Africa

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ethical oversight in impact evaluations: External advisory committees to assess programming risks

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-11-14

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Social scientists not only conduct impact evaluations but also participate in the design and implementation of the programs being evaluated. While Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) oversee research activities, they do not assess risks posed by the interventions themselves. We propose establishing External Advisory Committees (EACs) to provide independent, expert oversight of programming risks. EACs complement IRBs by focusing on potential harms to participants and communities, offering dynamic risk assessments, and advising on program adaptations or termination. By providing impartial expertise, EACs help address potential conflicts of interest that may arise when researchers and implementers are invested in a program's continuation. We illustrate the value of EACs through our experience implementing a cross-border labor migration program in Niger. Our EAC provided crucial guidance on scaling up the intervention after a pilot study and adapting the program following an unexpected military coup. While EACs introduce additional costs and may limit researcher autonomy, they generate accountability and are particularly valuable for novel and politically sensitive interventions in fragile environments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Targeting Incentives for Environmental Stewardship (TIES)

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-09-04

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Budgets Shape Power Sharing in Autocracies

  Quarterly Journal of Political Science · 2024-01-22 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How do government budgets affect autocrats’ incentives to share or consolidate power? We estimate a dynamic decision problem in which autocrats build their ruling coalitions to maintain power and maximize rents amid fluctuating budgets. Even for unconstrained autocrats, we find that ousting (potential) rivals is costly and, when budgets are tight, reduces their short-term survival prospects. Despite these upfront costs, exclusion has dynamic benefits during periods of prolonged budget contraction: autocrats reduce patronage obligations that they may struggle to afford on a tighter budget, which increases their long-term survival chances and share of spoils. By contrast, budget upswings have lasting positive effects on power sharing. Our counterfactuals indicate that budget shocks comparable to those generated by recent commodity booms increase the probability of inclusive ruling coalitions by over 10 percentage points over 25 years. Case studies of Sudan and Liberia indicate that our model and results describe the tradeoffs and survival strategies of real-world autocrats.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Concession Stands: How Mining Investments Incite Protest in Africa

  Harvard Dataverse · 2021-11-18

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Foreign investment in Africa's mineral resources has increased dramatically. This paper addresses three questions raised by this trend: do commercial mining investments increase the likelihood of social or armed conflict? If so, when are these disputes most prevalent? And, finally, what mechanisms help explain these conflicts? I show, first, that mining has contrasting effects on social and armed conflict: while the probability of protests or riots increases (roughly doubling) after mining starts, there is no increase in rebel activity. Second, I show that the probability of social conflict rises with plausibly exogenous increases in world commodity prices. Finally, I compile additional geo-spatial and survey data to explore potential mechanisms, including reporting bias, environmental harm, in-migration, inequality, and governance. Finding little evidence consistent with these accounts, I develop an explanation related to incomplete information—a common cause of conflict in industrial and international relations. This mechanism rationalizes why mining induces protest, why these conflicts are exacerbated by rising prices, and why transparency dampens the relationship between prices and protest.

  PublisherDOI

• Citizen monitoring promotes informed and inclusive forest governance in Liberia

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021-07-12 · 32 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Global forest loss depends on decisions made in the rural, often poor communities living beside the Earth's remaining forests. Governance problems in these forest-edge communities contribute to rapid deforestation and household vulnerability. In coordination with experimental studies in 5 other countries, we evaluate a program that recruits, trains, and deploys citizens to monitor communal forestland in 60 communities in rural Liberia. The year-long intervention is designed to promote more informed and inclusive resource governance, so that that citizens' preferences (and not just leaders' interests) are reflected in forest management. In our control communities, households are uninformed and disengaged; leaders' authority is unchecked. The program both engages and mobilizes community members: households are better informed and participate more in the design and enforcement of rules around forest use. They also report receiving more material benefits from outside investors' activities in their community forests. The chiefs who lead these communities attest to strengthened accountability. Using both on-the-ground environmental assessments and remotely sensed data, we find no effects on forest use or deforestation. Households do not favor more conservation, and, thus, more inclusive management does not reduce forest use. Conservation likely requires compensating community members for foregoing forest use; citizen monitoring, we argue, could ensure that such schemes enjoy popular support and do not just benefit local elites.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Maarten Voors

  University of California, Los Angeles

  41 shared

• Bilal Siddiqi

  20 shared

• Johannes Haushofer

  16 shared

• Oeindrila Dube

  University of Chicago

  11 shared

• David D. Laitin

  Palo Alto University

  8 shared

• Francisco Garfias

  University of California, San Diego

  5 shared

• Graeme Blair

  5 shared

• Aaron Rudkin

  University of California, Los Angeles

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Political Science

  Stanford University

  2016