Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Collective Efficiency Building

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Addressing local environmental threats and improving neighborhood quality often requires the collective actions of numerous and diverse residents. One example of an environmental and socio-economic threat that poses a neighborhood-scale collective action problem is invasive species. Combatting invasive species across private lands and achieving the associated ecological and socio-economic benefits typically requires motivating a critical number of residents to engage in control efforts on their property. A wide range of literature has suggested that, in such collective action scenarios, residents may be influenced by their perceptions of collective efficacy, or the extent to which they believe that enough others will contribute so that the collective goal will be achieved. Although recent literature has suggested that residents? invasive species control actions may be related to perceptions of collective efficacy, field research is lacking on how neighborhood collective efficacy can be built among residents to encourage sustained engagement in invasive species control. Rather, the majority of outreach and educational programs aimed at motivating resident engagement in control efforts have focused primarily on providing financial subsidies for control supplies and information about the impacts from invasive species. This project investigates an outreach intervention?s effectiveness at enhancing residents' perceptions of collective efficacy and sustained engagement in invasive species control on their property and in their neighborhood. If this intervention, which is based on social-psychological principles, is effective, then the study would suggest a novel approach that could potentially be used for building collective efficacy in a diversity of contexts in which the provisioning of a public good requires the actions of numerous and diverse participants. The intervention could, for example, be applied to enhance residents' collective efficacy to improve neighborhood informal social control or enhance resident engagement in other pro-social behaviors that have an impact at the neighborhood scale, such as volunteering for local parks or schools. This project specifically seeks to increase resident engagement in control of the invasive little fire ant (Wasmannia auropunctata) on private lands on the island of Hawai'i. The researchers, in collaboration with the Big Island Invasive Species Committee, conduct a field experiment to examine the extent to which a collective efficacy-building intervention increases residents' participation in behaviors to monitor and reduce the spread of little fire ants on their property and in their community. Some residents recruited to attend meetings in six communities will receive individual and collective ant control goals, be encouraged to make public commitments regarding future ant control behavior, and have opportunities to discuss and share their efforts. Other residents will receive more traditionally used "knowledge-transfer" approaches and financial subsidies for ant control supplies. The researchers assess the effectiveness of new and traditional approaches using pre- and post-intervention surveys of resident perceptions and self-reported behavior, and monitoring of little fire ant populations. The study addresses gaps in the literature by integrating an array of techniques used or hypothesized to build collective efficacy and cooperation in collective-action situations.