Project Details
Description
Current planetary crises, like climate change, biodiversity loss, and unsustainable development are accelerating rapidly due to human activity. These environmental problems are increasing in complexity and cannot be solved by simple technological fixes. Policies to address these interlinked challenges need to draw on the best available science while also ensuring that they do not create unintended consequences, especially for people who are already vulnerable. This planning grant will enable researchers at Rutgers University to work together with other scientists around the globe to explore possible solutions to these problems through case studies across fisheries, food systems, and biodiversity and invasive species that illuminate effective and innovative policies and identify key gaps in environmental governance. The team’s engagement with global partners contributes to the strengthening of international social science exchanges and partnerships on environmental challenges. Through these collaborations, the anticipated center will be a catalyst to activate social science insights and build a suite of techniques and technologies across cases that can be shared with partners in policy institutions, NGOs, local communities, and elsewhere. This planning grant will allow the research team to design a future Center on Sustainability and Governance in the Anthropocene (C-SAGA). Barriers to governing include the increasing complexity and interdependence of ecological and socio-economic systems; spatially and temporally distant and diffuse environmental impacts; novel conditions of deep uncertainty; and the potential for irreversible tipping points, cascades and feedbacks. Ensuring that any response to these Anthropocene challenges is grounded in justice is crucial. The innovation of the center will be to coordinate and advance cutting-edge social science scholarship to identify innovative mechanisms, behaviors and structures that can facilitate new forms of governance. The proposed C-SAGA center will engage in transdisciplinary research on new forms of governance for our current environmental challenges, particularly policies and innovations that improve stakeholder participation, involve different knowledge systems, and help create more equitable outcomes for all through engaging with stakeholders and policymakers to design and implement new experiments in transformative policy. The future center will be designed around experiments in innovation, diffusion and learning, including developing incubators for governance actors to exchange and scale up models, and training to improve capacities in governing across knowledges and scales. In exploring gaps in governance for sustainable socio-ecological transformations and opportunities for collaborations with other institutions and potential partners, the research team will create the foundations for a future proposal for a research center that meets local, national, and global needs.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.
Status | Active |
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Effective start/end date | 12/15/23 → 4/30/25 |
Funding
- National Science Foundation: $99,470.00
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