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

社会、行为和经济科学司提供博士后研究奖学金，为最近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，并扩大他们在本科和研究生训练之外的科学视野。博士后奖学金的进一步设计是为了帮助新科学家指导他们跨越传统学科线的研究工作，并利用他们自己独特的研究资源、地点和设施，包括在国外的研究地点。该博士后奖学金支持研究社会行为、风险缓解和环境变化的新兴跨学科科学家。日益危险的野火条件对人类福祉、生计的可持续性以及机构和社会的复原力提出了挑战。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，导致每年摧毁数千所房屋和烧毁数百万英亩林地的大规模特大火灾。环境变化的范围和速度要求采取集体行动：协调交流必要的信息，以制定对新的危险条件的应对措施，并合作开展跨越私有财产和行政边界的减轻风险活动。这项拨款支持一名SBE博士后，以提高对从私人土地所有者到联邦机构决策者等不同个人群体如何共同努力减少野火易发地区的危险条件的科学理解。该研究还确定了某些社会互动模式帮助人们实现降低风险目标的条件。该项目增进了对有效减轻风险战略的了解，并向联邦、州和地方各级森林和火灾管理决策者以及脆弱社区成员传播可操作的科学发现，从而促进了国家健康、繁荣和福利。本项目调查了影响目标、限制和集体努力结果的因素，以应对与环境变化相关的风险。具体而言，该项目提出了一个概念框架，并测试了以下假设：(1)个人集体行动的目标如何取决于他们在社会网络中的嵌入程度，如他们与野火风险相关的正式组织和非正式团体的隶属关系；(2)危险条件的具体条件（空间尺度、不确定性）如何塑造这些集体行动的成本；(3)结果如何取决于个体参与者之间的局部互动模式。利用因果推理模型的面板数据，该研究通过确定形成价值观和目标的机制以及限制这些行动有效性的因素，促进了对个体如何通过集体行动应对环境变化的理解。通过明确研究特定区域内个体对新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体如何经历环境变化的认识。该研究通过促进对行为策略如何依赖于个体行为者所经历的特定交易成本以及策略如何影响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，对于理解社会系统如何在空间和制度尺度上自我组织，以及在不断变化的环境条件下对人类和社会福利的影响是必要的。

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.