PhD Studentship: Global Methane Politics

University of Leeds - Faculty of Social Sciences, politics and international studies funded studentship 2025-26

Eligibility: UK only

Funding: 1

Lead Supervisor’s full name & email address: Professor Jan Selby, J.Selby@leeds.ac.uk

Project summary

1x fully funded 3.5‑year POLIS PhD scholarship starting October 2026 available, plus a maintenance stipend matching UKRI rates (£21,805 in 2026/27).

The successful candidate will join and become an integral part of the Global Methane Politics project (METHPOL), a five-year European Research Council-funded project led by Professor Jan Selby in the School of Politics and International Studies at Leeds.

The overall objectives of this project are to contribute to global climate change research and practice by exploring 1) the distinctive political dynamics and challenges associated with methane emissions and methane emission reduction efforts; and 2) why methane emissions are proving so hard to control, despite their acknowledged importance as a short-term climate forcer and the abundance of low-cost technical mitigation solutions. The project will involve research across all the major methane emitting sectors – including livestock, oil and gas, solid waste, coal, and wastewater – and in more than a dozen countries spanning global North and South, and every continent.

The project adopts a broadly political ecology theoretical approach, and will involve research at many different scales, from international policy arenas right down to the level of individual mines, farms and treatment plants where methane is emitted and governed in practice. The project will principally make use of qualitative methods, especially documentary analysis, interviews and observations.

Within this overall context, this scholarship is open to proposals relating to any aspect of methane politics. Proposals may:

• Focus on any of the project’s five core sectors (livestock, oil and gas, solid waste, coal, and wastewater), or on other important sources of methane emissions (e.g. rice farming), or may be cross-sectoral in approach.
• Relate to any particular country (or countries) and any particular scale(s).
• Employ any theoretical or methodological approach, so long as broadly compatible with the overall aims of the METHPOL project.

The successful candidate will be embedded in a dynamic interdisciplinary team in Leeds’ School of POLIS, and will play a key role in designing and delivering the METHPOL project. They will be inducted into the project alongside other members of the project team (the PI, three post-doctoral research fellows, one other PhD researcher, and project administrator) during the first year of their PhD studies.

They will then design PhD projects which are original but also compatible with the overall approach of the METHPOL project. They will undertake extensive primary research (including, where appropriate to the candidate’s project, extensive international fieldwork), which will be fully covered by project funds. They will collaborate, both during and after completing their fieldwork, with other team members to compare across sites, scales and sectors, and to explore the broader implications of these sectoral and comparative findings for global methane and climate research and practice.