Justin Dargin, Ph.D.

The global energy transition is not merely a climate mandate. It is a fundamental restructuring of fiscal stability, state sovereignty, and balance-sheet power across hydrocarbon-producing nations and emerging economies.

Justin Dargin, Ph.D., advises governments, sovereign wealth funds, and multilateral institutions on transition architecture, sovereign carbon finance, and strategic energy infrastructure. A Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, he also chairs Tangelic, an emerging-market climate investment platform. His background includes appointments as a Senior Scholar at the University of Oxford and a Middle East–North Africa Fulbright Scholar. His advisory mandates and institutional engagements include OPEC, Shell, the Dubai Supreme Council of Energy, the World Bank, and the United Nations.

His scholarship anticipated many of the structural challenges now shaping the Gulf’s climate and energy agenda. At Harvard University’s Belfer Center, he authored the first published blueprints for Gulf carbon-market development and diagnosed the emerging UAE domestic natural gas crisis, earning the Harvard University Arab Alumni Association Award. At the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, he published the first definitive study of the Dolphin Project, pioneering the analysis of cross-border Gulf gas integration and infrastructure geopolitics.

At the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Doha, he conceived and led the Gulf Climate Leadership Initiative, convening its inaugural roundtable with Gulf energy ministry representatives, senior international energy executives, and technical policy experts.

Dargin is the author or editor of five books on global energy and state transformation, including The Gulf’s Climate Reckoning (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and the forthcoming Sovereignty by Design (Cambridge University Press, 2027). He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and an LL.M., magna cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center, and is fluent in Arabic and Spanish.