The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis

Mansee Bal (Fall 2011) is a PhD scholar (II Yr) in Public Administration at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and also involved in education in Master of Science in Urban Management courses at Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, IHS. She is interested in urban development and landscape design projects and has founded along with her husband Akshay Bhargava, the consultancy firm namely, Environmental Design Consultants EDC, at Ahmedabad, India. Her PhD research on “Towards Sustainability of Urban Lake Systems in India: A Governance Approach” takes a closer look at the urban dynamics of land-water governance. The larger purview is to address the sustainable management of natural resources that are facing stress in the fast urbanizing areas. The research is based on the institutional analyses and understanding of the system (social-ecological) dynamics. The foundation, therefore, lies in the application of the SES-IAD framework. At the Workshop, she plans to further develop her knowledge of the application, opportunities, and challenges of using the SES-IAD framework for studying natural resource management. She also plans to organize her literature review and build the research design based on the readings and explorative fieldwork experience in four cities in India. mbal@indiana.edu

Ivo Baur (Fall 2011) is a PhD candidate in Geography at Karl Franzens University, Austria. He is analyzing common-property pastures in the Swiss Alps from a social-ecological systems perspective. Thereby, he is investigating the interplay of rules, and actors’ land-use decisions. At the Workshop, he will statistically analyze survey data explaining appropriation and contribution levels of different actor groups. Additionally, he will further develop the system dynamics model of the case study region. During his stay, Ivo would like to compare the rules regulating the use of common-property pastures in the Alps with the rules applied in the governance of other common-pool resources. ibaur@indiana.edu

Joanna Chan (Fall 2011) is a PhD candidate in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research interest is to study the decision-making process of communities regarding sustainable use and management of common-pool resources. Joanna will conduct her research in Bolivia, where she will study how 200 rural communities govern their forestry resources as well as the motivations behind their decisions. At the Workshop, Joanna plans to fine-tune her research plan, which investigates the role of property-rights regimes on community decision making. joachan@indiana.edu

Rahul Chaturvedi (Fall 2011) is working with Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), India. A graduate in Economics and Post Graduate in Rural Development, his interest lies in exploring institutional arrangements at different levels for effective governance of common-pool land and water resources. He has undertaken research on the significance of common-pool resources to rural households, institutional parameters influencing governance of commons and livestock-common-agriculture interface in arid and semi-arid areas of India. During the IFRI training program, he aims to develop a deeper understanding of the social-ecological systems framework and other theoretical foundations and research methods for studying human-environment interactions. rahuchat@indiana.edu

Vikram Dayal (Fall 2011), an environmental economist, works at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, India. He completed a PhD in economics from the University of Delhi and worked at Ranthambore National Park. As a recipient of the Partha Dasgupta Fellowship awarded by SANDEE (South Asian Network of Development and Environmental Economics), he will visit the Workshop, where he will work on examining the potential of multilevel modeling to illustrate institutional issues in environment and development economics. vikdayal@indiana.edu

Daniel DeCaro (August 2010–August 2012), PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher and visiting scholar at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and the assistant director for Indiana University’s Interdisciplinary Experimental Laboratory. There, Daniel is working to apply his formal expertise in Applied Social and Cognitive Psychology to institutional policy evaluation, design, and implementation. Daniel is especially interested in the relation between participatory forms of human governance and individuals’ commitment to the goals and rules inherent in such institutional settings. As such, his research examines the behavioral and economic implications of stakeholder participation in institutional design and implementation. Currently, Daniel’s work uses laboratory- and field-based experimental research methodologies to examine three important topics of such institutional psychology: (1) everyday rule acceptance and task performance (e.g., at home, school, work and civil society), (2) social justice-based judgment and decision making in economic and institutional settings, and (3) the psychological mechanisms behind stakeholder-run institutions (i.e., self-governance), in such domains as community markets and community-based natural resource conservation in developing nations. ddecaro@indiana.edu

Klaus Eisenack (Fall 2011) is assistant professor for Environment and Development Economics at the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany, where he leads the Chameleon Research Group since 2008. In 2006, he received a PhD in mathematics at the Free University Berlin. His current research focuses on adaptation to climate change and models of institutional arrangements. Further interests are natural resource management and games on global change. At the Workshop, he wants to investigate collective-choice agreements for managing increasing water heat and scarcity in Europe due to climate change. This serves as a case study for contributing to the diagnostic approach by drawing on previous work about archetypes of social-ecological systems. kleisena@indiana.edu

Zenebe Gebreegziabher (Fall 2011) is a research fellow at the EfD (Environment for Development) initiative center in Ethiopia/EEPFE and an assistant professor at the Department of Economics, Mekelle University. His research interest in relation to common-property resources lies on welfare implications of institutional alternatives in common-pool resources management. Specifically, his interest lies on empirical approaches to understanding and explaining the common-property problem or collective action. Therefore, during his stay at the Workshop, besides following the IFRI training course, he will be making use of opportunities including: (1) working on IFRI dataset for potential papers, (2) work on “review of local common-pool resource management institutions in Ethiopia” that would serve as an input for an extended research project involving rigorous experimental and empirical analysis, and (3) depending on the availability of time, will also be working on developing survey instrument for baseline data collection on “local common-pool resource management institutions in Ethiopia.” zgebreeg@indiana.edu

Jesper Larsson (Oct 2010-Oct 2012), Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, received a PhD degree in Agrarian History in October 2009. In his research about agricultural systems, he has used theories about the management of common-pool resources. As a postdoc at the Workshop, he would like to develop the knowledge of commons and common-pool resources from a historical perspective. One goal is to describe and compare the complex mix of organizations governing common-pool resources in the Nordic countries from 1500 to 1850. The aim is to increase the comprehension of the importance of these organizations and to emphasize how these organizations were a part of the feudal society. larslars@indiana.edu

Anas Malik (Spring 2012) is associate professor of Political Science at Xavier University, Cincinnati. His interests are in political Islam and political economy of development. His book Political Survival in Pakistan (Routledge, 2011) examined leader and challenger strategies and their implications for governance. During his time at the Workshop, he will work on a project tentatively titled Polycentricity and Political Islam. Drawing extensively on cases from Pakistan, this project emphasizes the constitutional level of analysis and political theory grounded in normative tradition. A particular focus will be on the challenges and opportunities presented by informal institutions, networks, and quasi-state actors.

Francesco Minora (February-March 2012) is a post-doc researcher, Euricse European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises, Trento, Italy. The time spent at the Workshop will be useful to get an overview about the scientific literature on the commons related to the topics of research and give a scientific colloquium with experts from a methodological point of view. In particular, the specific phenomenon of homeowners' associations will be explored.

Tania Ng (Fall 2011) recently graduated from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Her research interests are in the field of social gerontology and political science of religion. Her current research focuses extensively on studying Elderly Activities Clubs (EACs) in Japan to identify microsituational variables that foster trust and cooperation among participants. At the Workshop, she intends to explore the role of social capital in building community networks for the care of the elderly. tng@indiana.edu

Pratiti Priyadarshini (Fall 2011) is working with the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), a non-governmental organization set up in 2001 to reinforce the massive and critical task of ecological restoration work in the country. A graduate in Political Science and a postgraduate in Rural Development, she has been working on issues of community-based natural resource management with focus on common-pool land and water resources in Rajasthan, India. Her recent work involves undertaking background research for discussion on the Policy on Commons in the State of Rajasthan, India, which has helped in understanding the legal aspects of the issues related to common resources. At the Workshop, she hopes to develop a better understanding of the research methods for studying institutional aspects of governance of commons and analyzing the commons-livelihood relationship of the communities, particularly in rural areas. pratpriy@indiana.edu

Hannes Rusch (Fall 2011) studied philosophy and mathematics. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in philosophy of biology at Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany. He works on Dr. Ulrich Frey’s research project on sustainable CPR management and also at the Peter Löscher Chair of Business Ethics at TU München. His main research interests are cooperation research, experimental approaches in philosophy, and cultural evolution theory. For the Peter Löscher Chair of Business Ethics, he is developing experimental software and building up a laboratory for experimental ethics. hrusch@indiana.edu

Carl Salk (Fall 2011) is a postdoc at the University of Colorado and a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. Most of his background and experience is in forest ecology, and he is now working at the interface of ecology and forest resource management. He is at the Workshop to attend the IFRI training course. csalk@indiana.edu

Audun Sandberg (Fall 2011) is professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Science, University of Nordland, Bodø, Norway. He has visited the Workshop on several occasions since 1990. For many years, he has been working with analyzing institutions for governing resources in northern areas in coastal, forest, and mountain environments. During the last four years, he has been part of a large EU-project on Science and Policy Integration in Coastal Systems. While visiting at the Workshop, he will work on refining the findings from this large project in terms of understanding coastal systems as complex social-ecological systems with a dynamic character.

Nazif Shahrani (academic year), professor in Central Eurasian Studies, Anthropology, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. Professor Shahrani is on sabbatical for the 2011–12 academic year. shahrani@indiana.edu

Rebecca Stecker (Fall 2011) is a PhD candidate at the Department of Economics, Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, and works in the research group “Chameleon—Adapting Energy and Transport to Climate Change.” Her current research interests focus on institutional analysis of adaptation policies, the role of the government in adaptation policy, and the interplay between different actors in this policy arena. At the Workshop, Rebecca intends to work on one of her PhD papers, analyzing institutions to govern water scarcity conflicts due to a changing climate. rstecker@indiana.edu

Andreas Thiel (February – March 2012) is assistant professor at the Division of Resource Economics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. His research interests are the social sciences and institutional economics of social-ecological systems with substantive work focussing on water and marine governance in Europe. Throughout his stay at the Workshop, he intends to work on the analysis and write-up of data he gathered on “re-scaling” of resource governance (marine and water management) in the European Union, and on a nature-related transactions focus and its relation to the SES. thiela@indiana.edu

Runsheng Yin (academic year) associate professor and resource economist at Michigan State University and director of the Ecosystem Policy Institute of China. Funded by NSF and other agencies, he has assessed the socioeconomic impacts of China’s ecological restoration programs and evaluated the induced changes in ecosystem services. In addition to many book chapters, he has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in more than 20 journals, and edited one book, titled An Integrated Assessment of China’s Ecological Restoration Programs and two journal special issues in Environmental Management and Forest Science. During his stay at the Workshop, Runsheng will continue his work on assessing ecological restoration programs and evaluating ecosystem services in China within a social-ecological system framework. yinr@indiana.edu