Planning: CRISES: Building Collective Action for Sustainable Habitats

This project applies behavior science research approaches to investigate how people self-organize to manage the use of natural resources. There is a pressing need for understanding and improving collective action participation in native habitat conservation and restoration in grassland ecosystems. This planning project is for a research center that will use knowledge from psychology research to build communities and networks that help maintain vital natural resources for the common good.

The project focuses on native watershed habitat rehabilitation and maintenance in urban/rural settings as a test topic. The research team investigates the social, environmental, and information infrastructure that tend to lead to sustained natural resource governance arrangements. This work is developed in partnership with local stakeholders to build sustainable community-involved research opportunities (social infrastructure).

The deterioration of collective action for maintaining natural resources as common goods is an ongoing, complex, and global problem. Collective action can under some conditions sustain these natural resource governance arrangements. However, lack of participation and free-rider problems are two of just many challenges that pose barriers to sustained common-pool resource management.

Previous work has identified the conditions that tend to support sustained governance of common pool resources. This project specifically investigates how to build and maintain those characteristics. The research project focuses on the context of urban/rural native watershed habitat rehabilitation and maintenance.

A key challenge in these systems is how to translate existing insights about the features of existing systems that successfully maintain common goods into ways to effectively change social, political, economic, and environmental contexts that will bring common and public goods situations into full collective action participation. This project addresses this need by developing multi-site, community engaged research labs that a) test the application of techniques from cognitive and social psychology to guide changes to people’s experienced environment, and b) build the infrastructure of people, resources, and equipment needed to support common goods in at-risk grasslands ecosystems.

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.