Hardin gave us the tragedy of the commons; Ostrom showed communities can govern one without collapse. Data center siting breaks both models: mobile, multinational capital drawing on resources still stuck at the local scale.
David P. Adams, Ph.D.
Environmental Policy / Collaborative Governance / Public Institutions
I'm an Associate Professor of Public Administration at California State University, Fullerton. My work looks at how people build power together, how agencies actually work, and how we can do better by each other.
Quick Links
I earned my Ph.D. in public policy and public administration from Auburn University, then joined the faculty at California State University, Fullerton. I serve as Associate Chair of the Division of Politics, Administration, and Justice and as MPA Director.
- If you're looking for the student orgs I advise or want to schedule time with me, start here.
- The about page has the longer version, along with my GitHub and CSUF profile.
- I keep a course resources site with slides, assignments, and materials, plus a syllabi repository I update regularly.
Recent Writing
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July 3, 2026
The Commons Was Never Empty. It Was Just Ours.
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June 19, 2026
The Mac mini Bookkeeper
Claude Code's memory layer was quietly burning ~1,400 LLM calls a day against my usage limits. I moved all that background bookkeeping onto my kid's M4 Mac mini running Ollama — local, private, and free.
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March 11, 2026
Whisper for Accessibility: A Practical Solution for April 2026 ADA Compliance
With the April 2026 ADA Title II deadline looming, OpenAI's Whisper offers a practical, locally-run workflow for generating accurate caption files from course recordings — no vendor required.