Projects

Cutting across our research is a concern with how democratic politics influences natural resource management and decision-making. A particular concern lies in understanding how citizenship and contentious politics interact with scientific expertise in the making of public decisions about natural resources.

Current major research efforts of the Environmental Governance Group include:

• The relationship between forest plantations and rural livelihoods in India. We have funding from NASA to use a combination of remotely sensed data, household surveys, and official records to understand how government led plantation programs are reshaping local, forest-dependent livelihoods. Our fieldwork is focused in Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh.
• Understanding how science is utilized in US government decision-making. We have funding from NSF to use automated methods to gather and analyze scientific citation patterns in Environmental Impact Statements produced by the US Forest Service in order to understand the conditions that drive innovative uses of science in policy-making.
• Applying strategic foresight to National Forest planning. We have funding from the US Forest Service to study (and implement) techniques to improve the ways that strategic foresight is used in forest planning in the US National Forest System.
• Understanding how local politics influence decision-making in Minnesota county forest management.