In preparation for ABFM’s upcoming conference, I am doing a series of profiles on the doctoral students on the job market.

Juniper Katz is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado Denver. She will be presenting “Built to Last: Endowment Building Strategies and Repercussions for Charitable Nonprofits” in the 11:00am Thursday session.

Juniper is an environment and nonprofit scholar with applied and academic research experience. Juniper has two areas of research. One focuses on nonprofit financial management and the other focuses on citizen-state interactions in environmental policy settings.

Her dissertation, The Effects of Land Conservation Policy on the Creation of Public Values, examines how the process of land conservation policy implementation not only produces policy outcomes, but also changes how citizens and nonprofits conceive of their obligations to society. Using original surveys, text analysis, and content coding, she finds that agency managers use instrumental policy purposes to define a set of preferred values that are conveyed to landowners during implementation. The effect of such value conveyance was the voluntary adoption of new conservation practices by landowners. When asked why agency value promotion was meaningful, landowners report an increased awareness of the public benefit of their actions. These insights expand conventional understandings of democracy by including public administration in the creation and enforcement of public values.

She has a paper from the dissertation under peer review. In addition to the dissertation paper, Juniper has several other publications:

• A solo-authored paper that examines the effects of policy belief on the perceptions of actors engaged in debates over hydraulic fracking in New York was published in Review of Policy Research in 2018.
• A co-authored publication in the Journal Environmental Policy & Planning examines advocacy coalitions engaged in policy change in Indian shale gas development.
• A publication in Review of Policy Research analyzes the use of policy narratives in assessing the politics of climate and air issues.

Prior to returning to graduate school, Juniper worked for ten years in land and water conservation and was a nonprofit executive director. In that work, she raised over $5 million in grant awards for operations and program support from local, state, and federal sources and protected over 49,000 acres of agricultural, natural, and recreational land. Her applied experience informs her nonprofit and environmental policy research and teaching.

Juniper’s website and CV can be found at: juniperkatz.com