Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Social Mobilization and Institutional Origins in Catastrophically Climate Endangered Communities

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Alaska's rural communities are slipping off the face of the Earth. Rising sea levels, increasingly strong seasonal storms, and melting permafrost have put many villages throughout the state in intense danger. Yet despite generally shared cultural, economic, geographical, and demographic characteristics, Alaska?s most dramatically imperiled communities demonstrate remarkable divergence in their response to the disaster bearing down on them. More specifically, they have formulated, mobilized, and employed claims for recognition and assistance in a variety of ways. Why is the same phenomenon affecting these remote Arctic communities so differently? What determines a community?s capacity for resilience and adaptation in the face of a catastrophic event? Are there reasons to expect that this answer will be different under conditions of urgent crisis versus chronic crisis? In particular, how can this crisis serve as precisely the incentive some communities need to resolve their collective action problems even as that same crisis serves to create collective action problems in others?This research investigates this puzzling and critically important empirical divergence by exploring how and under what conditions the sustained, routinized, total shock of catastrophic disaster challenges and transforms long-standing dynamics of power and order in besieged communities, and how those transformations in turn reshape patterns of collective action and institutional adaptation and change. The project thus represents a significant contribution to a critical puzzle in social science inquiry: the question of institutional origins. By tracing the ideological and political process of responding to anticipated shock and profound change, not simply analyzing adaptation to such shocks after they have occurred, this research will shed new light on how and why chronic crisis can generate unique opportunities for collective action, social resilience, and institutional innovation at the local level. The conclusions of this study will have immediate practical applications for the geographically endangered and socio-economically marginalized Native Alaskan communities at the center of the study and well beyond them. By investigating different village-level efforts in Alaska, this study will ultimately assist in a greater coordination of efforts and the collective search for broader solutions for imperiled communities around the world who are coping with the very real challenges of dramatic environmental change.