Predictors of Successful Between-Community Cooperation in Effective Resource Management

资源管理和保护倡议往往需要社区共同努力，管理或保护森林、草原、流域和渔业。虽然发展伙伴强调扩大在新地区开展的倡议，但我们仍然不太了解社区何时以及为什么要或不要共同努力进行管理或保护，这阻碍了成功扩大规模，并可能导致捐赠资金的低效使用。该项目是与美国林业局资助的一个沿海社区网络合作开展的，它将来自学术界和发展界的研究结合起来，对社区何时以及为何在资源管理方面共同努力做出具体预测。资助和培训博士后1名、研究生1名、科研团队9名，培养科研方法。该项目将产生一套指导方针，指导发展伙伴如何选择社区间合作可能成功的试验点；在合作障碍有限的情况下，合作伙伴可以在扩大其倡议之前解决扩大规模的其他障碍。这个项目调查了个人对邻近社区发生的事情的关注，以及他们与这些社区的联系，是否促进了成功的资源管理。到目前为止，关于什么可能促进社区间合作的想法在很大程度上仍停留在理论阶段，通常在实验室中进行评估。该项目涉及在32个社区进行实地数据收集，在开展渔业管理倡议之前，项目团队将收集有关对邻近社区的态度和与社区的联系的个人层面数据，以及社区间合作的其他候选预测因素。然后，该团队将在计划推出12个月后重新访问这些个人，以衡量他们在社区间合作中的参与情况。通过评估基线因素与以后成功的资源管理的相关性，该项目为社区间合作何时以及为何有效的理论工作提供了现实世界的测试。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Resource management and conservation initiatives often require that communities work together to manage or conserve forests, grasslands, watersheds, and fisheries. While development partners emphasize scaling up the initiatives that work to new locations, we still understand little about when and why communities do or do not work together to manage or conserve, impeding successful scaling up and potentially leading to an inefficient use of donor dollars. This project, conducted in collaboration with a coastal community network that is funded by US Forest Service, unifies research from across academia and the development world to make concrete predictions about when and why communities work together in resource management. It will fund and train a postdoctoral researcher, a graduate student, and nine research team members in scientific research methods. The project will generate a set of guidelines for how development partners can select pilot sites where between-community cooperation is likely to succeed; with limited hurdles to cooperation, partners can then work out other obstacles to scaling up before expanding their initiatives.This project investigates whether individuals’ concerns about what happens to neighboring communities, plus their connections with those communities, promotes successful resource management. Until now, ideas about what might promote between-community cooperation have remained largely theoretical and have usually been evaluated in the laboratory. This project involves on-the-ground data collection in 32 communities, where the project team will collect individual-level data about attitudes toward and connections with neighboring communities, as well as other candidate predictors of between-community cooperation, before the rollout of a fisheries management initiative. The team will then revisit these individuals to measure their participation in between-community cooperation 12 months after initiative rollout. By assessing the relevance of baseline factors to later successful resource management, this project provides a real-world test of theoretical work on when and why between-community cooperation works.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.