Each month a brief article is written about current research activities at CSID.   Click on the links below to find out what our researchers are writing about.

November Highlight: The Global Ethnohydrology Project: Exploring Water Knowledge Across Cultures

Water quality, scarcity, and governance concerns are major global problems, impacting health, economics, and environment in many ways. As regions worldwide struggle to reconcile rapidly expanding population with increasingly overburdened water supplies, the need to address these problems becomes ever more urgent. Read More...

 

October Highlight: Collective Action and Land Conservation in the Shadow of the Wall

Borders pose particular challenges for governance, whether national, state, or municipal, due to the inability of a single government entity to make and implement policy. Cross-border institutions must overcome transaction costs, costs associated with coming to agreement, which increase with landscape ownership and management fragmentation. Although challenging, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and private landowners do come together in an effort to solve environmental dilemmas that cross local, state, and national borders. Read More...

 

September Highlight: Tinkering the Fit between Ecology and Institutions

An important challenge in the governance of social-ecological systems is the fit between ecological dynamics and institutional arrangements. When people are nomadic to adapt to spatial heterogeneity of precipitations, the installment of private properties hinders movement of livestock and the ability to cope with spatial differences in rainfall. Read More...

 

Public health and disease eradication goes beyond the administration of new medicines, vaccinations and other prophylactics. Outside of medicinal solutions, physical and behavioral arrangements offer alternative solutions that are becoming more viable in light of the possibility of treatment resistant diseases emerging, and the sustaining of long term population health. Public health can be viewed as a public good where we need to understand how to stimulate collective action to reduce disease agents.  Read More...

 

The world is becoming more complex and interlinked due to globalization and the advancements of technologies. Moreover, ecological degradation, conflicts, persistent poverty and hunger are all signs of an increasingly unstable world.  Read More...

 

May Highlight:  Institutional Change and Resilience of an Indigenous Irrigation System

Previous studies have suggested that collective-action institutions at smaller scales and local levels are at greater advantage than larger state systems because local users are likely to have greater local knowledge.  Read More...

 

April Highlight: Landscape Fragmentation under Rapid Urbanization

Urban sprawl and “leapfrog” development patterns increasingly fragment the landscape, especially at the metropolitan fringe. Previous studies have shown that landscape fragmentation has important consequences for biodiversity and ecosystems by altering ecological structure and function, resulting in changes in the provisioning of valuable ecosystem services.  Read More...

 

March Highlight:  Risk and Time Preferences

A fundamental question in economic development is the extent to which economic success is linked to basic features of human preferences.  Read More...

 

February Highlight: Credit can Make or Break: Why is the Design of Credit Institutions so Critical for Resilience?
Every passing month brings forth news about a deepening credit crisis, which has now penetrated almost every element of our socio-economic system.  Unless the credit markets unfreeze, we are told the economy will not survive. Read More...

 

Visiting scholar Örjan Bodin employs a network perspective in studying ecosystems and/or actor/stakeholder interactions in natural resource governance settings.   Read More...

 

December Highlight:  Food Security in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
The concept of food security is a critical research interest and a targeted social issue for governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) alike. One of the deficiencies in the food security literature is research on the coping strategies of food-insecure households.  Read More...

 

November Highlight: Robust Control of Irrigation Systems
The United Nations estimates the world population will increase to about 9 billion by the year 2050.  Read More...

 

October Highlight: Institutional Arrangements in Transboundary Conservation
Transboundary protected areas are part of the latest trend in biodiversity conservation. By working across international boundaries, advocates claim ecological, economic and peace dividends beyond the benefits of conservation projects confined by national boundaries.  Read more...

 

September Highlight:  The Gentle Way of Changing Behavior
The solution to most problems humanity faces depends, to a certain degree, on changing individual behavior. Governments can introduce laws and taxes, but individuals must accept those ordinances and are responsible for voting legislators into office.  Read more...