COS 91-6 - What social and ecological factors drive collective efforts to manage invasive plants on community forest land over time?

Thursday, August 15, 2019: 3:20 PM
M101/102, Kentucky International Convention Center
Abigail Sullivan1, Scott T. Yabiku2, Abigail M. York3, Michele D. Clark4, Li An5, Sharon J. Hall4 and Dirgha J. Ghimire6, (1)Environmental Resilience Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, (2)Population Research Institute and Department of Sociology and Criminology, Pennsylvania State University, PA, (3)School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, (4)School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, (5)Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, (6)Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Background/Question/Methods

Institutional research has discovered much about what drives collective action to manage common pool resources, including factors such as information availability, risk perceptions, environmental degradation, and efficacy. In a 2017 analysis of collective efforts to manage an invasive plant, the mile-a-minute weed (Mikania micrantha), in subtropical Chitwan, Nepal, we found risk perceptions, reliance on forest resources, and sociodemographic variables (at both household and community forest user group levels) were positively associated with collective action. Researchers have called for studies of sustainable natural resource use that incorporate: social and ecological data, quantitative and qualitative data, larger sample sizes, more sophisticated methods, and/or comparative cases. It has been argued that addressing these areas will improve our ability to generalize findings and produce actionable research. In this research, we incorporate social and ecological data to analyze efforts by community members to manage invasive plants (M. micrantha and Chromolaena odorata) present in locally governed community forests in Chitwan. We combine household surveys (N = 1041), ecological surveys (>1000 plots), and spatial data in a Bayesian hierarchical model to explore changes in collective action since initial household surveys in 2014.

Results/Conclusions

The preliminary results identify key drivers of collective action over time, including perceptions of invasive plants within and around Chitwan National Park as harmful and sociodemographic variables. The social-ecological systems approach indicates that household perceptions of the presence of invasive plants are more influential in collective action decisions than the actual, ecologically-measured, presence of the plants. We highlight the policy implications of our findings (e.g., designing policies that motivate collective action and equitable resource management) and add to research proposing that integrating social and ecological data leads to scientific and policy insights not otherwise possible. In addition to furthering our understanding of what motivates collective action, the Bayesian approach offers several benefits to social-ecological systems research, including uncertainty quantification, a particularly useful element for decision makers.