Stephen Mumme is Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University where he specializes in comparative environmental politics and policy with an emphasis on Mexican government and U.S.-Mexican relations.   Early in his career he developed a keen interest in Mexican demographic policy and immigration issues.  Since joining the Colorado State University faculty in 1983, however, most of his work has centered on water and environmental management along the U.S.-Mexico border.  Unlike most specialists who focus on these problems from an international relations perspective, he prefers to examine these issues from a domestic politics perspective, focusing on the politics and domestic governance that shapes political and diplomatic outcomes in bilateral controversies over water, territory, and natural resources.   He continues to follow Mexican immigration issues, however, and teaches a section on the topic in his popular undergraduate course, Politics and Society on the U.S.-Mexico Border.  

He is the author of various monographs and book chapters and co-author with Alan Lamborn of Statecraft, Domestic Politics, and Foreign Policy Making (Westview 1988).His journal articles appear in Political Research Quarterly, Policy Studies Journal, Policy Studies Review, Publius, Social Science Journal, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Environmental Politics, Natural Resources Journal, Journal of Environment and Development, Environmental Management, Environment, Government and Policy C:  Environmental Planning, Tulane Journal of Environmental Law, Latin American Perspectives, North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commerce, Case Western International Law Journal, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Frontera Norte, Region y Sociedad, Journal of Transboundary Water Resources, North American Outlook, North American Environmental Law and Policy, Journal of the West, Journal of the Southwest, and Latin American Research Review.   He currently serves on the editorial boards of Regions and Cohesion, the International Journal of Sustainable Society, the Open Law Journal, the Journal of Borderlands Studies, and Annual Editions:  Developing Areas with past service as deputy editor of the Social Science Journal and service on the boards of Political Research Quarterly and the Boundary and Security Bulletin. One of his most recent articles on border water management, “The Liquid Frontier,” was published in the “Best of the Decade” edition of the Journal of the West in 2010.   

In 2004 he received the College of Liberal Arts’ John N. Stern Distinguished Professor award.