Doctoral Dissertation Research: Social Change, Moral Decision-Making, and Resource Allocation

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Increasingly, local communities are challenged by the need to manage scarce natural resources and ecosystem services for the common good. Social scientists have found that when management authority remains at the local level, it is often less expensive and more effective than policies established from the top down. However, as communities become larger and technologies become more complicated, local management may be replaced by programs and policies emanating from higher levels. This raises the question of what it is that makes local control successful. With the guidance of Dr. Norbert O. Ross, Vanderbilt University doctoral student, Werner Hertzog, will undertake research to answer this question. Findings will contribute to our theoretical understanding of the relationship between culture, economic behavior, and institutions. This, in turn, can help government and private organizations design resource management systems that build on existing ones, saving money and preserving local control.The research will be conducted in a Tzotzil-Maya municipality of southern Mexico. This site was chosen because the region has undergone drastic changes over the past five decades. Furthermore, modernization has affected Tzotzil villages unevenly, which allows investigators to compare communities differing in degree of access to markets and modern infrastructure within a single ecological setting and ethno-linguistic group. Pilot studies have revealed systematic differences between more traditional (rural) and more modern (urban) Tzotzil villages with respect to notions of fairness regulating resource allocation. These data suggest that modernization in these communities is tied to the emergence of new cultural models of justice and society, findings which are in line with results from related research documenting the cognitive effects of social change within the area. Therefore, the researcher will explore the dynamics and effects of cultural models and moral values in regulating economic and adaptive systems in cognition, social organization, and behavior. He will use a mixed methods approach combining: (1) detailed observational methods to document the processes through which communities and households make resource allocation decisions; and (2) economic and behavioral experiments to index moral preferences in how people solve hypothetical problems of resource allocation. By focusing on social change the research contributes to our understanding of how modernization affects traditional systems of knowledge and of how culture and moral notions affect resource management practices.