Collective Environmental Action: Processes and measures related to community action on sustainability and climate

WITH SUPPORT FROM THE UPS FOUNDATION AND THE PISCES FOUNDATION

This set of studies seeks to develop preliminary approaches for measuring and fostering collective environmental action in communities. This work examines the critical role of a community’s collective literacy as a motivator of action when grappling with climate change and other sustainability-related issues. To those ends, the main project goals are to: (1) Examine the various epistemological lenses by which environmental behavior change and action are understood at the collective level, (2) gather, coalesce, and analyze measures that aim to capture collective efforts, and (3) operationalize and revise for the environment and sustainability context those measures, culminating in pilot-testing those measures in on-the- ground, community-based settings.

PAPERS RELATED TO THIS RESEARCH INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:

Ardoin, N. M., Bowers, A. W., & Wheaton, M. (2023). Leveraging collective action and environmental literacy to address complex sustainability challenges. Ambio, 52(1), 30-44.  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-022-01764-6

Wheaton, M., Ardoin, N. M., Bowers, A. W., & Kannan, A. (2024). Sociocultural learning theories for social-ecological change. Environmental Education Research, 1-18.  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504622.2024.2347888?src=exp-la