Mark Lubell - US grants

The research examines institutional change in the context of local land-use politics. Conceptualizing land-use policy choices in terms of institutional change allows us to bring insights from institutional theory to bear on the broader topic of policy change. The main hypothesis is that local government structures, as crucial institutional mediators of political and economic forces, will influence policy dynamics in predictable ways. The focus on the structure of political institutions is a significant departure from property rights and interest group models that treat political institutions as largely transparent to the underlying economic or political forces driving land-use change. To emphasize institutions, the researchers offer a "political market" theory of institutional change that combines political economy theories of property rights with work on local government structure. The resulting framework conceptualizes institutional change as the result of a dynamic contracting process between the suppliers and demanders of change in a community. Political institutions combine with the structure of interest organization to determine outcomes. Different types of political institutions will favor different types of interests, either enhancing or reducing the ability of interests to influence land-use policy.
The debate whether form of government makes a difference for local policies remains unsettled because much of the work has focused only on fiscal outputs and has emphasized additive rather then interactive effects of government structure. The investigators' political market approach focuses not only on how the structure of local institutions directly influences land-use decisions, but also on how forces and interests identified in property rights and interest group models are mediated by local institutions.

Because land use institutions are central to the system of property rights at the local level this work has important implications for land-use governance. An enhanced understanding of the dynamics of land-use decisions will assist policy makers at all levels of government in the design of land use polices. By investigating the role executive and legislative structures, we can better understand the conditions under which local institutions are responsive to broad public interests and citizen participation. This also furthers education objectives by involving graduate and undergraduate students directly in the research process, and thus provides an alternative learning perspective to the traditional lecture format class.

This Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) project will examine two experiments designed to test models of social learning, which are the foundations of cultural evolution. These will examine conformity in five person groups with changing environmental parameters over time. The project will create a computer laboratory with local area networks to demonstrate how experiments can be used to test the theoretical underpinnings of models of cultural evolution. Subjects will be organized into five-person groups run simultaneously in the computer laboratory. Each subject will have to choose between two behavioral options, providing different payoffs, to be paid in real dollars at the end of the experiment.
The broader impacts of this work pertain to the fact that rapid social, economic, political and technological changes are occurring in the majority of society in the world, and increases in our basic knowledge of these processes will be valuable to decision makers as well as to the educated person concerned to understand contemporary life.

Humans differ from other animals in their great capacity to learn from each other. Recently, theories of cultural evolution have come to provide some insights to many important questions in social sciences, such as cultural variation, cooperation, social learning, and decision-making under uncertainty. Different social science disciplines are currently addressing these questions with divergent vocabularies and methodologies. Cultural evolution models and evolutionary theories in general have the potential to bridge disciplinary divides. Unfortunately, theories of cultural evolution have received little empirical testing in either field or experimental studies.
This project will conduct a series of micro-society experiments to test the behavioral implications of theoretical models of cultural evolution. Micro-societies are groups of interacting human participants who receive variable amounts of money based on how they perform over multiple time periods in an experimental task. Laboratory micro-societies are an attractive method because individual and population-level behavior can evolve and produce interesting emergent patterns over time. The researchers will simulate critical features of evolutionary models by controlling the structure of the experimental task and the kinds of information available to participants. They will develop a series of traditional and computer-mediated laboratory experiments, as well as Internet-based experiments that can tap into a global pool of subjects from diverse backgrounds and cultures, to test success-biased social learning strategies where people use the payoffs of others to guide their own decision-making. Theories of how people use the success of others to acquire their own behavior are common in the social sciences, but empirical tests and refinement of these theories is very uncommon. Thus this work will be of general importance to many fields concerned with the details of how people make decisions in social environments. The project will use maximum likelihood techniques to estimate how much participants rely on individual versus social learning under different experimental conditions.
The broader impact of the research relates to the value of new knowledge about the evolution of patterns of cooperation, institutions, and cultural norms and symbols. The research will help reveal the basic behavioral mechanisms that underlie these processes, and therefore will be useful to policy makers concerned with large-scale social changes that have profound implications for human welfare.

Social networks are an important influence on decision making for both innovation and cooperation. But what happens when a decision requires assessing both private benefits associated with innovation and the social benefits of cooperation? This research examines the role of social networks in sustainable agriculture by distinguishing between growers' information and cooperation networks, and analyzing which network structures have a more important influence on adoption behavior. The sustainable agriculture decisions of California winegrape growers provide a critical research site because the cooperation problems of environmental protection and regional reputation are particularly strong. Furthermore, many viticulture regions have local partnerships in place designed to change the structure of social networks and encourage the adoption of sustainable practices. The researchers will use a survey of winegrape growers in three regions of California (Lodi, Central Coast, and Napa) to analyze the effectiveness of local partnerships in reshaping social networks to facilitate sustainable practices.

The research contributes to "sustainability science," which is the application of scientific methods to analyze the often vague and debated concept sustainability. Sustainable agriculture promises to change agricultural practices in ways that enhance economic, environmental, and social welfare. This promise often goes unfulfilled, however, as the term sustainability is used to justify maintaining the status quo. This research provides empirical evidence about the social and institutional variables that will facilitate real changes in agricultural practices.

Many invasive species have strong negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem function and attempts to control or reverse their spread can be costly and require coordination among multiple institutions. This project integrates biological, mathematical, economic and political science tools to answer several critical and interrelated questions surrounding the invasive and high impact Eastern Smooth Cordgrass, Spartina spp, in San Francisco Bay. Two ways in which human intervention can mitigate the impact are to eradicate the invader and to restore the habitat. This is a complex problem with spatial linkages arising from the biology and impact of Spartina, and the spatial mosaic of governing agencies and responsible authorities. The project will focus on three questions: 1) What are the dynamics of eradication of an invasive species and subsequent restoration? 2) How can a program of eradication of an invasive species and subsequent restoration be designed taking into account both economics and ecology? 3) How do eradication and restoration policies depend on collective action on the part of multiple governmental and non-governmental stakeholders? This project will develop general models that will apply to a wide range of systems where an invasive species can have long lasting effects on the biotic and abiotic environment and to a much wider range of natural systems which are affected by humans and in which potential irreversibilities can occur.

The eradication of invasive Spartina is one of the top priorities recently identified in the West Coast Governor's Agreement on Ocean Health, which provides a mandate for its eradication from the Pacific Coast by 2018. The project will provide specific guidance for control and restoration efforts in San Francisco Bay, and in other west coast estuaries, and will provide interdisciplinary research training for several graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral scholars. Outreach will provide information to the public about Spartina and invasive species more generally. The tools developed and lessons learned can be applied broadly to the wide range of ecosystem management projects with feedbacks between natural and human systems, including invasive species management, fisheries, endangered species protection, forest management, and the provision of ecosystem services more broadly.

This team is exploring questions about how policy making actors decide which problems to tackle, what policymaking venues to participate in, and who to collaborate with in solving the problems. They hypothesize that the patterns of collaboration, or policy networks, strongly affect the efficiency and effectiveness of governing institutions in resolving complex problems.

The study involves three estuaries located in California, Florida and Argentina, where problems such as declining water quality, dwindling water supply, flooding, and threats to biodiversity require coordinated action from multiple stakeholders. The three sites provide different mixtures of regulatory, collaborative, and voluntary institutions governing these issues, and thus provide an ample range of conditions in which to study the questions. Data will be collected from news media and internet analysis as well as surveys of all major policy actors in each estuary. Analytic techniques will include qualitative descriptions of the local ecologies as well as quantitative analyses based on Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques.

The study seeks to integrate informal networks and institutional structure into a theory of governance more relevant to complex policy problems. In particular, the team seeks a better understanding of how natural resources are managed through cooperative activities when actors are embedded in complex policy-making systems. Many policy analyses focus on single policy programs, and advice from these studies can to lead to unintended consequences when they fail to recognize the complex interaction of actors, institutions, and problems within the full ecology of games. This study seeks to understand the interrelatedness of economic, environmental, and social benefits at stake in estuaries and similar ecological systems. In addition, the comparisons between the U.S. and Argentina enable analysis of how different political cultures and national institutions affect the ability of policy actors to solve these key environmental problems.

This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award will provide a new generation of scientists with the tools to address effects of climate change on water resources. Monitoring data in the Western U.S. show alarming trends in temperature, river flows and snowpack. General circulation models (GCMs) indicate these and other climate-driven trends will continue and accelerate. Currently, major scientific gaps and socioeconomic factors preclude reliable predictions of climate change impacts on water resources, agriculture, and natural ecosystems on a sub-continental scale (e.g., California, Chile). Climate change requires attention from an unprecedented range of scientific disciplines, including atmospheric science, computational science, ecology, economics, engineering, hydrology, political science, and soil science, among others.

Intellectual Merit: The Climate Change, Water and Society (CCWAS) project will develop needed synergies through 1) a framework for cutting-edge research that focuses on key interfaces of climate/water/social sciences, and 2) an unprecedented, integrative, flexible education and training program. CCWAS fellows will pursue a special degree designation in "Climate Change, Water and Society," core and interface courses in hydroclimatology and decision making under uncertainty, cyber-enabled audio and video instruction for joint course offerings and sharing among campuses, and an innovative "world café" style capstone course that annually defines state of the art and research needs in climate change, future water availability, and water resources management. Broader Impacts: Transformative qualities of the research will be broadened through collaboration and comparative studies with colleagues in Chile, which faces similar climate change and water challenges as California. An internship program will engage students with the government agencies responsible for mitigating and adapting to climate change effects.

IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Infrastructure networks in coastal communities must anticipate and respond to the emerging threat of coastal inundation due to sea level rise, tidal forcing, wind events and precipitation. As inundation events become both more frequent and more severe, human activities and services are disrupted, including transportation, recreation and economic activities. In many of these communities, decision making about protective infrastructure and transportation planning is highly dispersed and variable, including local property owners, individual communities, counties and regional, state and even federal agencies. The result is a highly multi-scale governance system in which decision-makers are influenced by local and regional interactions, while managing the multi-scale and interacting infrastructure that defines the shoreline and the transportation networks. This research project focuses on how the interaction of environmental forcing with the shoreline infrastructure disrupts the transportation network, and how both of these networks influence the governance network that makes planning decisions about the infrastructure. In the context of coastal flooding, this work will provide insights into how governance institutions and networks are prepared, or can be better prepared, to make effective decisions about infrastructure planning and operation.

Understanding the threat of flooding in urbanized coastal communities requires the integration of climate sciences, coastal oceanography and hydrodynamics, transportation engineering and planning and political science. In this Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) collaborative research project, these disciplines will be formally linked with one another using computational and empirical approaches to define the network structures. The goal is to examine multi-scale interactions between infrastructure and governance networks in the context of disruption by coastal inundation and flooding events. The underlying hydrodynamics and the nature of the transportation network ensure cross-scale interactions, both spatially and temporally, which must be a component of regional and local decision-making and governance. Through the use of state-of-the-art hydrodynamic models, projections will be developed for future inundation due to sea level rise, oceanic water level fluctuations including tides, and precipitation and runoff. With an inverse modeling approach, we will determine the local and regional impacts of infrastructure projects on water level and inundation, which will link to analyses of both the transportation infrastructure and the regional governance network. The transportation network will be analyzed to define both the short-term disruption of travel times by inundation events and the long-term optimal resource allocation across the network. The spatial structures inherent in the inundation and transportation network results will be compared to the empirically-defined governance network to examine whether the governance network is well-suited to manage the risks and actions associated with future inundation and associated transportation disruptions. The interaction between these three infrastructure networks (shoreline, transportation and governance) will be quantitatively analyzed to establish similarities in topology and flow and the influence of each network on the others. By applying this research on interacting infrastructure systems to the real-world problem of coastal flooding, an opportunity will be created to inform communities' proactive preparation for sea level rise, including decision-making about both transportation and shoreline infrastructure development. In the San Francisco Bay Area, work will be done with the Climate Readiness Institute to connect with practitioners and managers through a series of workshops designed to inform the research and communicate research findings. Finally, the interdisciplinary nature of the research provides an outstanding opportunity for young scientists to develop. The project will involve 2 postdoctoral scholars and 3 graduate students, who will be involved with all aspects of the project, including outreach through the creation of "CRI Fellows" who connect directly with area practitioners.

Asking Different Questions in Climate Change Science, Impact, Mitigation and Adaptation examines how integrating cultural and social literacies into research training for climate and environmental scientists can produce more ethical, effective, and relevant research. The project will test the hypothesis that training in understanding the relationship between environmental change and culture will produce scholars capable of engaging in research that addresses the disproportionate environmental impact on vulnerable and historically marginalized communities. An expected outcome is that providing climate and environmental scientists with training in environmental justice, science & technology studies, indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and community-engaged research will elevate their capacities to be agents of ethical change. The result will be a diverse group of scientists engaged in research that addresses the challenges of climate change, mitigation and adaptation, while also producing greater social equity.

This project's objectives are to (1) create a customized training on equity and ethic challenges in climate science, (2) deliver these trainings in climate science graduate coursework across seven different departments, (3) engage in a comparative analysis to study their efficacy and (4) disseminate the training. A key measure of success for the program will be the achievement of learning objectives and students' level of engagement in questions of ethics and equity. The study will contribute to research on the ethics engagement by examining the efficacy of an equity-oriented ethics training. The proposed training is likely to spur projects that reduce the impacts of climate change on under-resourced communities. The training may also contribute to cultural changes within scientific communities, which may help with the retention of women and underrepresented populations in climate science.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.