Kenji Shiraishi

About

Kenji is a Ph.D. stu­dent with the Gold­man School of Pub­lic Pol­icy and a researcher in the Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Energy Lab­o­ra­tory. His cur­rent research inter­ests include empir­i­cal stud­ies and quan­ti­ta­tive mod­el­ing on the effec­tive­ness of renew­able energy poli­cies in devel­op­ing and devel­oped coun­tries for effec­tive deci­sion mak­ing. He is also inter­ested in devel­op­ing bet­ter tools for quan­ti­ta­tive assess­ment of the mul­ti­ple ben­e­fits of cli­mate poli­cies such as energy access, job cre­ation, and tech­nol­ogy devel­op­ment and transfer.

Kenji has more than 10 years of pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ences in the area of Japan’s inter­na­tional envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies as a Deputy Direc­tor for Market-​​Based Cli­mate Pol­icy of the Japan­ese Min­istry of the Envi­ron­ment, and as a Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of the Global Envi­ron­ment Cen­tre Foun­da­tion, etc. For exam­ple, he has spear­headed and man­aged var­i­ous gov­ern­ment energy incen­tive pro­grams for fund­ing energy effi­cient and renew­able energy projects in Japan as well as in South­east Asia and Africa under the Joint Cred­it­ing Mech­a­nism, a bilat­eral coop­er­a­tion scheme between 14 coun­tries and Japan­ese Gov­ern­ment. He has also ini­ti­ated and led inter­na­tional coop­er­a­tion ini­tia­tives on envi­ron­men­tal pol­icy plan­ning, capac­ity build­ing, and tech­nol­ogy trans­fer focused on low-​​carbon city devel­op­ment with Japan­ese munic­i­pal­i­ties for Ho Chi Minh City (Viet­nam), Vien­tiane (Lao PDR), and other cities. He has nego­ti­ated at COP 18 and 19 of the UNFCCC as an inter­na­tional nego­tia­tor of the Japan­ese del­e­ga­tion on tech­nol­ogy trans­fer. Out­side of envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies, he is a cre­ator and a lead­ing trainer of pol­icy analy­sis train­ing courses for Japan­ese pol­icy professionals.

He holds an MPP from UC Berke­ley, where he was awarded the Smolen­sky Prize for Outstanding Advanced Pol­icy Analy­sis (master’s the­sis), for which Dan Kam­men was his APA advi­sor. Kenji has a MEng and a BEng in Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing from Uni­ver­sity of Tokyo.

Research Interests

• Climate Change
• Energy, Renewable and Clean Energy
• Environment
• Innovation
• Quantitative Methods