Research
My goals in research are to advance understanding of (1) how environmental policy outcomes reflect patterns of interactions within communities of policy actors, as well as (2) how environmental policy actors behave in response to different sets of constraints and opportunities that characterize policy arenas. I draw upon the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, the Ecology of Games framework and theories of network science to contribute to interdisciplinary fields such as collaborative environmental governance, social-ecological systems dynamics and sustainability science. Key methodological approaches include traditional econometric modeling, inferential network analysis and spatial analysis.
Collaborative governance of climate change across spatial and institutional scales
Are policy actors more likely to collaborate if they jointly participate in the same policy-making processes? What conditions of these processes increase/decrease the likelihood of collaboration? We address these questions using data on actors' interactions and their participation in collaborative climate change adaptation policy venues operating in the Lake Victoria region in East Africa. We estimate an exponential random graph model to assess both the conditional odds and probabilities of collaboration between pairs of actors as a function of whether they jointly participate in policy venues, as well as the characteristics of those venues. Consistent with recent research, we find that joint participation indeed increases the likelihood of collaboration. We further show that this effect intensifies when actors jointly participate in venues that (1) operate in smaller geographic areas and (2) primarily engage in operational choice decision-making, rather than collective or constitutional choice decision-making. Collaborators: Mark Lubell (UC Davis); Emilinah Namaganda (Wageningen) |
Cross-scale linkages in climate change adaptation policy networks
We use a survey of climate change adaptation policy actors operating in the Lake Victoria basin, East Africa, to study patterns of collaboration among actors as well as engagement in various policy venues. In this institutional setting, actors confront challenges associated with the need to harmonize actions across diverse and large scale policy arenas, as well as the need to coordinate exchanges of knowledge, data, funding and other key resources across local, national, and international levels. Core hypotheses of environmental governance theory highlight the importance of these cross-scale linkages—which may include interactions between national and international actors as well as interactions between national and international policy venues—but the conditions under with they emerge remain poorly understood. We address this gap: leveraging a unique policy network dataset that includes policy actors as well as the policy venues in which they participate, we draw upon inferential network analysis methods to show that cross-scale linkages between actors are brokered principally by international policy venues; however, national organizations disproportionately broker cross-scale linkages between policy venues. Collaborators: Mark Lubell (UC Davis) |
Multi-objective management: optimizing sage-grouse conservation and rangeland productivity in a changing landscape
On the Modoc Plateau (Northern California, NW Nevada, SE Oregon) sage-grouse habitat and rangeland productivity are both threatened by the encroachment of western juniper. We developed a multi-objective spatially explicit model to explore how a range of different strategies for removing juniper stands might help land managers address ecological and economic objectives. Despite considerable rhetoric that removing juniper to increase forage production for cattle simultaneously improves sage-grouse habitat, we found that restoration that prioritized rangeland productivity did not necessarily result in improved sage-grouse habitat. Although both objectives were somewhat complementary, the key implication of our model was that restoration initiatives will likely not address multiple goals unless they are specifically designed to do so. Collaborators: Shahla Farzan (UC Davis), Derek J. N. Young (UC Davis), Allison G. Dedrick (UC Davis), Erik C. Porse (UC Davis), Gabriel Sampson (UC Davis), Peter S. Coates (USGS) |