Collective action by community groups: solutions for climate change or different players in the same game?

Abstract

Community groups are taking initiatives to adapt to a changing climate. These organizations differ from businesses and governments by being non-profit, often informal, resource limited, and reliant on volunteer labor. How these organizations facilitate collective action is not well known, especially since they do not necessarily solve common pool resource governance, but rather improve common pool resources through collective action. In fact, at first glance, community groups seem to not have the means for solving collective action problems used routinely in industry and government, such as paying people for cooperation or punishing them for lack of it. This article investigates how community groups solve collective action problems though data gathered across 25 organizations in three sites -Sitka, Alaska, USA; Toco, Trinidad; and a global site of distributed citizen science organizations. We found that community groups used positive reinforcement methods common to industry and used little punishment. Groups also engaged in mechanisms for collective action, such as relying on altruistic contributions by few individuals, that generally are not considered commonplace in businesses and governments. We conclude discussing implications from this study, arguing that classic collective action theory can be helpful for un-black-boxing community, and that policymakers can deploy resources to facilitate collective action and ultimately reduce climate change's local impacts.

Assessing the role of carbon pricing in global climate change mitigation strategies

“…Climate change is a global challenge that requires collective action to address transboundary emissions effectively (Matthews et al, 2023). International cooperation enables countries to collaborate on emissions reduction efforts, share best practices, and develop common strategies to mitigate climate change.…”

Conceptualising the Link between Citizen Science and Climate Governance: A Systematic Review

“…Three publications focus on the European context, especially delving into EU policy, regulations and research agendas, and their link with the practice of CS [89][90][91]. Among studies with a multifocal approach that collect data in different countries, six are comparative case studies [92][93][94][95][96][97], and two are conceptual articles which include case studies being discussed [98,99]. One interesting feature is that the study area often exceeds the national borders and embraces geographical regions or ecosystems characterised by the presence of relevant natural elements or resources, whose conditions are being impacted by climate change; i.e., the Baltic Sea [78], the Himalayan region [79,80], river basins [81][82][83], groundwater aquifers [84], forests [85,86], coral reef [87] and migratory flyways [88].…”

“…Three publications focus on the European context, especially delving into EU policy, regulations and research agendas, and their link with the practice of CS [89][90][91]. Among studies with a multifocal approach that collect data in different countries, six are comparative case studies [92][93][94][95][96][97], and two are conceptual articles which include case studies being discussed [98,99].…”

“…In this regard, effective participatory research and governance strategies should encompass a thorough consideration of attitude and behaviour change dynamics [94,108,114,117], as well as issues of maintaining motivation and engagement over time [78,88,92,95,97,108], and investigate the related underpinning psychosocial processes. For example, Gharesifard and Wehn, following the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) [134], identified a list of drivers and barriers to public participation in citizen weather observatories, stating that comprehension of these factors is mandatory to engage citizens in climate change adaptation [94].…”

“…In the field of STS, we found mentions of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Jasanoff's notion of civic epistemology and concept of co-production [55,78,84,106,110,142]. Ostrom's concept of the commons and collective action theory were also mentioned, e.g., [91,95,131]. Regarding the level of public participation, we found reference to Arnstein's ladder of participation [106,143], Rowe's typology of public engagement [112,144], and Haklay's levels of participation in CS [113,117,145].…”