Linking social and ecological embeddedness, wildfire risk, and collective action

社会、行为和经济科学局提供博士后研究奖学金，为新近毕业的博士毕业生提供获得额外培训的机会，在知名科学家的赞助下获得研究经验，并在本科生和研究生培训之外拓宽他们的科学视野。博士后奖学金的进一步设计是为了帮助新科学家引导他们的研究努力跨越传统的学科界限，并利用独特的研究资源、地点和设施，包括在国外。这一博士后奖学金为正在崛起的研究社会行为、风险缓解和环境变化的跨学科科学家提供支持。日益危险的野火条件给人类福利、生计的可持续性以及机构和社会的复原力带来了挑战。例如，在美国西部，不断变化的气候条件与森林管理的历史遗产和当代土地利用模式相互作用，导致大规模大火，每年摧毁数千座房屋，烧毁数百万英亩林地。环境变化的范围和速度需要采取集体行动：协调以交流制定应对新危险条件所需的信息，以及合作开展跨越私人财产和行政边界的风险缓解活动。这笔赠款支持SBE的一名博士后研究员，以提高对不同群体--从私人土地所有者到联邦机构的决策者--如何共同努力，减少易发生野火的地区的危险条件的科学理解。这项研究还确定了某些社交模式帮助人们实现风险缓解目标的条件。该项目通过提高对有效风险缓解战略的了解，并向联邦、州和地方各级的森林和火灾管理决策者以及脆弱社区的成员传播可行的科学发现，促进国家的健康、繁荣和福利。这个项目调查了影响集体努力解决与环境变化相关的风险的目标、限制和结果的因素。具体地说，该项目提出了一个概念框架，并测试了以下假设：(1)个人的集体行动目标如何取决于他们如何嵌入社会网络，如他们与关注野火风险的正式组织和非正式团体的关系所表明的那样；(2)危险条件的具体条件(空间规模、不确定性)如何影响这些集体行动的成本；以及(3)结果如何取决于个别行为者之间的当地互动模式。这项研究利用面板数据进行因果推理建模，通过确定塑造价值观和目标的机制以及限制这些行动有效性的因素，促进了对个人如何通过集体行动对环境变化做出反应的理解。通过明确研究个人对给定区域内新的环境条件做出反应的集体行动的多样性，该研究提高了对社会行为如何依赖于网络位置以及个人如何体验环境变化的知识。这项研究通过促进对行为策略如何依赖于个体行为者经历的特定交易成本以及策略如何塑造集体行动结果的理解，为交易成本理论做出了贡献。了解局部因果机制如何在不同的社会和生态背景下塑造集体行动及其结果，对于理解社会制度如何在空间和体制尺度上自组织，并在不断变化的环境条件下对人类和社会福利产生影响，是必要的。

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship supports a rising interdisciplinary scientist studying social behavior, risk mitigation and environmental change. Increasingly hazardous wildfire conditions presents challenges for human welfare, the sustainability of livelihoods, and the resilience of institutions and societies. For example, in the western United States, changing climatic conditions interact with the historical legacy of forest management and contemporary land use patterns, resulting in large-scale megafires that each year destroy thousands of homes and burn millions of acres of forestland. The scope and pace of environmental change requires collective action: coordination to exchange information necessary for developing responses to novel hazardous conditions as well as cooperation to implement risk mitigation activities that span private properties and administrative boundaries. This grant supports an SBE postdoctoral fellow to improve scientific understanding of how diverse groups of individuals, ranging from private landowners to decision-makers in federal agencies, work together to reduce hazardous conditions across wildfire-prone landscapes. The research also identifies the conditions under which certain patterns of social interaction help people achieve goals for risk mitigation. This project advances national health, prosperity and welfare by improving knowledge of effective risk mitigation strategies and by disseminating actionable scientific findings to forest and fire management decision-makers at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as to members of vulnerable communities. This project investigates factors that shape the goals, limitations, and outcomes of collective efforts to address risks associated with environmental change. Specifically, the project advances a conceptual framework and tests hypotheses about (1) how individuals' goals for collective action depend upon how they are embedded in social networks, as indicated by their affiliations to formal organizations and informal groups concerned with wildfire risk, (2) how specific conditions of hazardous conditions (spatial scale, uncertainty) shape the costs of these collective actions, and (3) how outcomes depend on local patterns of interaction among individual actors. Drawing upon panel data for causal inference modeling, the research advances understanding of how individuals respond to environmental change through collective action by identifying mechanisms that shape values and goals as well as the factors that constrain the efficacy of these actions. By explicitly studying the diversity of collective actions by which individuals respond to new environmental conditions within a given region, the research improves knowledge of how social behavior depends upon network position and how individuals experience environmental change. The research contributes to theories of transaction costs by advancing understanding of how behavioral strategies depend upon the specific transaction costs experienced by individual actors and how strategies shape collective action outcomes. Knowledge of how localized causal mechanisms shape collective action and its outcomes across different social and ecological contexts is necessary for understanding how social systems self-organize across spatial and institutional scales, with implications for human and societal welfare under changing environmental conditions.