Department of Anthropology

Abstract:        The world faces an increasing number of pressing, interconnected environmental governance challenges linked to climate change, including freshwater drought, invasive species, and declining forest health. Most of these issues are characterized as collective action problems, and in cases where multiple stakeholder types are involved, collaborative governance is often posed as a solution. But a diverse body of environmental governance research has found that there remain more questions than answers related to both catalyzing collective action and implementing collaborative governance. In this talk, I will highlight three themes unpacking these issues, grounded in my research in forestry and freshwater systems. First, factors that motivate participation in collective efforts to govern natural resources are spatial, dynamic, and social-ecological. Second, collaborative governance, particularly in transboundary water basins, is often marked by multi-scale conflicts that raise questions about how collaborative governance is approached. Third, I will discuss several related projects that use different approaches to explore collective elements of invasive species management in the US with implications for how people govern invasive species and freshwater in a changing climate.

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