Research

Working papers

Localized Legitimacy: Organizational Legitimacy of Environmental Civil Society in Emerging Markets

A conjoint study of how citizens in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore evaluate the legitimacy of environmental governance arrangements. The paper develops a framework of local imperative and examines gender-conditional preferences for governance authority.

Under review

Service vs. Advocacy: Regime Type and Media Depictions of Environmental NGOs

With Jeffrey Grove

Newspaper coverage of Greenpeace and WWF across six Southeast Asian countries, 2001 to 2022. The analysis combines BERTopic, dictionary-based sentiment analysis, and mixed-effects models to examine how regime type shapes media depictions of advocacy and service work.

Working paper

"I Will Make Upon the Earth a Successive Authority": Religious Environmental Stewardship and Support for Energy Transition

With Yusri Supiyan

A four-arm survey experiment testing Islamic stewardship, secular humanism, and local-benefits framings of solar park siting in peninsular Malaysia.

Fielding 2026

Framing the Future: Public Attitudes Toward Mining and the Energy Transition in the Philippines

With Aseem Prakash and Nives Dolsak

A survey experiment on the Tampakan copper-gold project, examining how investor nationality and framing of the energy transition shape citizen support for mining.

Pre-analysis plan registered

Foreign Ownership and Public Support for Nickel Mining in Indonesia

With Aseem Prakash and Nives Dolsak

A five-arm vignette experiment on how the nationality of the investor shapes citizen support for nickel extraction.

Pre-analysis plan registered

From Land to Sea? Public Willingness to Substitute Deep Sea Mining for the Green Transition

With Kayla Morton

A study of public willingness to accept deep-sea mining as an alternative source of critical minerals for the green transition.

Working paper

Mapping the AI Governance Ecosystem: A Club Goods Typology of AI Standards and Instruments

An inventory of roughly 120 AI governance instruments. The paper applies the Prakash-Potoski club-goods framework to map the strength of standards and to examine what voluntary AI governance implies for standard-takers.

Working paper

Book project

Public Legitimacy and Civil Society in Southeast Asia. Book manuscript in progress for the Cambridge University Press Elements series.

Public writing

Parr, Christianna. 2026. "When Performance Is Not Enough: Managing NGOs in an Age of Digital Mistrust." Asian Management Insights. March. [link] [PDF]

Parr, Christianna, Nives Dolsak, and Aseem Prakash. 2019. "The Amazon isn't the only forest that's burning. Can consumer pressure stop the destruction?" Washington Post: Monkey Cage. October 14. [link] [PDF]

Parr, Christianna, Nives Dolsak, and Aseem Prakash. 2018. "The Oxfam scandal shows that, yes, nonprofits can behave badly. So why aren't they overseen like for-profits?" Washington Post: Monkey Cage. February 19. [link] [PDF]