Linking social and ecological embeddedness, wildfire risk, and collective action

Hamilton Matthew, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship supports a rising interdisciplinary scientist studying social behavior, risk mitigation and environmental change. Increasingly hazardous wildfire conditions presents challenges for human welfare, the sustainability of livelihoods, and the resilience of institutions and societies. For example, in the western United States, changing climatic conditions interact with the historical legacy of forest management and contemporary land use patterns, resulting in large-scale megafires that each year destroy thousands of homes and burn millions of acres of forestland. The scope and pace of environmental change requires collective action: coordination to exchange information necessary for developing responses to novel hazardous conditions as well as cooperation to implement risk mitigation activities that span private properties and administrative boundaries. This grant supports an SBE postdoctoral fellow to improve scientific understanding of how diverse groups of individuals, ranging from private landowners to decision-makers in federal agencies, work together to reduce hazardous conditions across wildfire-prone landscapes. The research also identifies the conditions under which certain patterns of social interaction help people achieve goals for risk mitigation. This project advances national health, prosperity and welfare by improving knowledge of effective risk mitigation strategies and by disseminating actionable scientific findings to forest and fire management decision-makers at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as to members of vulnerable communities. This project investigates factors that shape the goals, limitations, and outcomes of collective efforts to address risks associated with environmental change. Specifically, the project advances a conceptual framework and tests hypotheses about (1) how individuals' goals for collective action depend upon how they are embedded in social networks, as indicated by their affiliations to formal organizations and informal groups concerned with wildfire risk, (2) how specific conditions of hazardous conditions (spatial scale, uncertainty) shape the costs of these collective actions, and (3) how outcomes depend on local patterns of interaction among individual actors. Drawing upon panel data for causal inference modeling, the research advances understanding of how individuals respond to environmental change through collective action by identifying mechanisms that shape values and goals as well as the factors that constrain the efficacy of these actions. By explicitly studying the diversity of collective actions by which individuals respond to new environmental conditions within a given region, the research improves knowledge of how social behavior depends upon network position and how individuals experience environmental change. The research contributes to theories of transaction costs by advancing understanding of how behavioral strategies depend upon the specific transaction costs experienced by individual actors and how strategies shape collective action outcomes. Knowledge of how localized causal mechanisms shape collective action and its outcomes across different social and ecological contexts is necessary for understanding how social systems self-organize across spatial and institutional scales, with implications for human and societal welfare under changing environmental conditions.