Dr. Renata Faizova was a visiting scholar in the Centre for European Studies from November 2024-October 2025. She is also a faculty member at M. Narikbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, and previously held a visiting scholar position at Istanbul University in Türkiye.
Dr. Faizova has worked within the industry energy sector in Kazakhstan advancing and implementing company policies towards energy transition. These academic and industry experiences have shaped her research trajectory, which focuses on climate and energy governance in Eurasia.
Dr. Faizova first came to Canada to study sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan, where she became interested in comparing climate policies and sustainability frameworks in Kazakhstan and Canada. Both countries are resource-dependent, with strong mining and energy sectors, and both have made public commitments to climate targets aligned with international agreements. However, during her studies and early fieldwork, she began to see that similarities in stated commitments did not necessarily translate to similarities in governance practices or codified policy implementation.
After completing an MA in Sustainability from the University of Saskatchewan, she joined the Centre for European Studies at UBC to deepen this research and connect with scholars from UBC and the lower Mainland working on sustainability across disciplines and regions. Her time at the Centre involved participation in lectures, workshops, and collaborations with the Centre for Climate Studies, UBC Sauder Business School, Department of Political Science, which helped broaden the scope of her project. Through these discussions, it became increasingly clear that comparing climate governance frameworks required more than analyzing legislation and public policy. Rather, her conversations led to discussions about how climate governance consists of interdependent state and non-state actors shaped by cultural, historical, and institutional dynamics and histories. The divergence between Canada and Kazakhstan, she concluded, “was not just a matter of legislative action—it reflected different histories of governance and public participation.”
This change in the scope of her project led Dr. Faizova to conduct interviews with energy companies and corporate sustainability officers in Kazakhstan. The interviews revealed a key tension around the question of decentralization in climate governance:
“Half of them [executives of energy companies] said, decentralization can work in Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, the other half of the interviews, said, ‘Oh, with our current mentality it is impossible, because now at least we have this authoritarian hardcore [climate] targets, that we try to follow.’”
Mixed responses between industry and government policy pose a critical problem in Kazakhstan. While decentralization may promote innovation and regional accountability, it also challenges long-standing political structures and policy implementation.
Alongside corporate actors, Dr. Faizova also interviewed grassroots organizers and residents of rural communities. These conversations reinforced the idea that environmental concerns are deeply localized, even when climate change discourse may feel abstract or external:
“What is very important in Kazakhstan—beyond all the climate-related issues—are the environmental issues not directly associated with climate, but as consequences of human activity, like water scarcity and pollution.”
Dr. Faizova’s findings show that public awareness and concern tend to emerge not through global climate narratives but through the immediate realities of land, water, and health. Sustainability, she emphasizes, is often embedded in lived cultural practice rather than externally imposed as policy:
“Sustainability is not an additional part or climate related, it’s a part of everything—sometimes, it’s even built into local culture.”
Dr. Faizova notes that her academic experience in Canada also shaped her understanding of how climate and sustainability are discussed. She observed a subtle but meaningful difference in framing across regions:
“I remember when I was in Saskatchewan, the discussion was focused solely on sustainability and sustainable systems. When I came to BC, I attended many events and usually, the term resilience consistently brought up. And for me, this is very important, because resilience has a deeper meaning and emphasizes the long-term.”
Dr. Faizova seeks to advocate for a change in how we discuss climate governance away from sustainability towards resilience in policy and legislative circles.
Her work posits a key insight for global climate governance: policy design and implementation cannot be separated from cultural expectations, local knowledge systems, and the lived realities of communities. Her ongoing research demonstrates that sustainability is not simply a regulatory framework to be adopted, rather it is a relationship between people, resources, and governing bodies at all levels. As she continues her research, Dr. Faizova aims to contribute to academic discussions, as well as, to more grounded, context-specific models of climate and environmental governance that recognizes resilience as a set of practices should be furthered.
The research Dr. Faizova has conducted here in here at UBC has resulted in a recently published peer-reviewed article: Ingelkofer, S., & Faizova, R. (2025). “Climate governance: Comparing centralized and decentralized approaches.” Journal of Central Asian Studies, 23 (3): 28–54. https://doi.org/10.52536/3006-807X.2025-3.002.
