Krister Andersson is Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for the Governance of Natural Resources at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He studies the politics of environmental governance and is particularly interested in local institutional arrangements and the role they play in explaining policy outcomes. Most of his recent work seeks to explain subnational variation in local governance outcomes in Latin America. This is also the theme of his most recent book, Local Governments and Rural Development (University of Arizona Press, 2009), which is co-authored with Gustavo Gordillo and Frank van Laerhoven. In it they conduct a comparative analysis of the institutional conditions for public service performance in 390 local governments in the rural areas of Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru.