About
38
Publications
17,055
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,160
Citations
Introduction
I am a Professor of Political Science at UAF specializing in environmental and marine policy. I have worked with and researched policy options for community-based resource management and collaborative management since the mid-1990s. I have ongoing projects relating to ocean and Arctic governance.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
July 2018 - February 2019
August 2009 - present
Publications
Publications (38)
Rapid environmental change in the Arctic has led to calls for new forms of environmental governance that consciously fit policy solutions to both the policy problem as well as the underlying social–ecological system dynamics. While efforts to evaluate the ecological fit of institutions to place have become more sophisticated, efforts to measure the...
Though it has been home for centuries to indigenous peoples who have mastered its conditions,the Arctic has historically proven to be a difficult region for governments to administer. Extreme temperatures, vast distances, and widely dispersed patterns of settlement have made itimpossible for bureaucracies based in far-off capitals to erect and main...
As climate change has driven dramatic changes in Northern sea ice regimes, marine mammals have gained iconic status around the world reflecting the perils of global warming. There is a tension between policies that have international support like a ban on seal hunting or whaling, and the adoption of adaptive, flexible rules that are likely to work...
Rapid ecological and social change in the Arctic challenge conventional methods of policy analyses and prescriptions. This is especially true for the conservation of ice-dependent species as climate warming has reduced sea ice cover. Polar bears are an interesting case to examine, as they are subject to a bundle of institutions, many of which cross...
Enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services (ES) that underpin human well-being is critical for meeting current and future societal needs, and requires specific governance and management policies. Using the literature, we identify seven generic policy-relevant principles for enhancing the resilience of desired ES in the face of disturbance and o...
United States federal lands are managed for multiple conservation, social, and commercial goals shaped by the visions of diverse interest groups. The rural economic and food-security needs of local public-lands-based communities have important implications for sustainable natural-resource management but can be obscured by national-scale public comm...
Institutions are influential in mediating the impact of adaptation initiatives at the local level, yet there are disconnects between the goals of multi-scale planning initiatives and community priorities. Research to address this challenge primarily focuses on reform to formal institutions in environmental governance. Meanwhile, knowledge of the sp...
Rapid changes of socio-economic, climatic, and environmental conditions in the Bering Strait region are concurrent to an increase in the participation of multiple actors with diverse and sometimes conflicting priorities. Within theories of the policy process, the Advocacy Coalition Theory describes the ways in which advocates shape policy ideas thr...
There are limited approaches available that enable researchers and practitioners to conduct multiple case study comparisons of complex cases of collaboration in natural resource management and conservation. The absence of such tools is felt despite the fact that over the past several years a great deal of literature has reviewed the state of the sc...
Indigenous arctic communities access terrestrial and marine wildlife. This access contributes to their food sovereignty. Ineffective management of wildlife that migrate internationally jeopardizes local and regional access to these species and subsequently hunting practices and human health. Despite general recognition of the role of effective tran...
A central challenge facing the study the environmental governance is the lack of commonunderstanding of important concepts. Critical concepts such as social boundaries, property rights, and resource dependence are selected and measured inconsistently across research projects and field settings, producing results that are difficult to compare. This...
Full Arctic Resilience Report can be downloaded from https://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=3047
Rapid change and uncertainty create new demands on governance structures, especially to accommodate new
knowledge and take action to respond to new priority issues. While the Arctic Council has been able to accommodate some issues that were...
The full Arctic Resilience Report 2016 can be downloaded from https://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=3047.
As the Arctic's sole circumpolar high-level policy forum, the Arctic Council plays an increasingly important role in issues that have major social and environmental implications. Institutions such as the Arctic Council help guide...
The full Arctic Resilience Report 2016 can be downloaded from https://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=3047.
Key Messages • The need to be responsive to evolving conditions places constantly changing demands on policy and decision-making structures. Maintaining effectiveness requires an ongoing effort to facilitate and accelerate learnin...
There is an increasing demand in higher education institutions for training in complex environmental problems. Such training requires a careful mix of conventional methods and innovative solutions, a task not always easy to accomplish. In this paper we review literature on this theme, highlight relevant advances in the pedagogical literature, and r...
As both the societies and the world in which we live face increasingly rapid and turbulent changes, the concept of resilience has become an active and important research area. Reflecting the very latest research, this book provides a critical review of the ways in which resilience of social-ecological systems, and the ecosystem services they provid...
Polycentricity is a governance system in which there are multiple interacting governing bodies with autonomy to make and enforce rules within a specific policy arena and geography. These governance authorities interact with others at similar scales horizontally and within nested scales vertically. Multiple governance units have been suggested to pr...
Participation refers to the active engagement of relevant stakeholders in the management and governance process. Participation can range from simply informing stakeholders to complete devolution of power. It may occur in various or all stages of a management process: from identifying problems and goals to implementing policy, monitoring results or...
The Montreal Protocol is generally credited as a successful example of international cooperation in response to a global environmental problem. As a result, the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances has declined rapidly, and it is expected that atmospheric ozone concentrations will return to their normal ranges toward the end of...
The institutions governing sea ice system services in the Arctic are associated with particular places, species, and environments. Yet scholars rarely consider the way these associations may present barriers to, or facilitate, effective translation of scientific data into broadly available information for stakeholders to create and debate policy. I...
Enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services (ES) that underpin human well-being is critical for meeting current and future societal needs, and requires specific governance and management policies. Using the literature, we identify seven generic policy-relevant principles for enhancing the resilience of desired ES in the face of disturbance and o...
Enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services (ES) that underpin human well-being is critical for meeting current and future societal needs, and requires specific governance and management policies. Using the literature, we identify seven generic policy-relevant principles for enhancing the resilience of desired ES in the face of disturbance and o...
In 2010 a US proposal to uplist polar bears to Appendix I of CITES was rejected. Parsons and Cornick (2011, [1]) critiqued this decision and the IUCN/TRAFFIC analysis that supported it. Their critique overlooks several important dimensions of polar bear conservation. Foremost, they failed to explore what subsistence hunting actually means in this c...
Arctic coastal populations share a close relationship with their environment consisting of linkages among communities, landscapes and seascapes, and the social institutions developed to sustain the system. This cultural–biogeophysical dynamic is termed throughout the section as a social–ecological system (SES). Marine mammals constitute a large por...
{textlessptextgreatertextless}br/textgreaterWhile a sustained flow of ecosystem services brings tangible benefits to humans, some ecosystem states and suites of services may be more desired by some people than others. Allocating or using the flow of services is loaded with asymmetries, complex power dynamics and political struggles between groups o...
A growing number of authors have explored marine mammal co-management institutions in Alaska. Many of these accounts focus on contemporary dilemmas while placing the conflicts or cooperative success in context. However, none has taken a comprehensive look at institution-building for marine mammal management as an historical process of political dev...
Due to their unique characteristics, the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas have escaped many, though not all, of the problems encountered in more temperate seas. For most of the 20th century, multi-year sea ice provided a barrier to significant industrial activity in the Arctic Ocean. Even though the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas have not been managed seas, pe...
The Arctic sea ice system can be holistically characterized as a social-ecological system that provides not only vital geophysical and biological services to climate and oceans but also provisioning services to people and industry. These services are under threat from the three major interconnected global forces of increasing traffic for shipping,...
Decision rules are the agreed-upon points at which specific management interventions are initiated. For marine mammal management under the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), decision rules are usually based on either a numeric population or biological-removal approach. However, for walrus and other ice-associated pinnipeds, the inability to...
Severe climate change is one of multiple stressors capable of impacting migration in Alaska. This paper uses a scenario of climate change and rising energy costs to explore potential changes in Interior Alaska that may contribute to higher rates of rural-to-urban migration over the next twenty years in Fairbanks, Alaska. While Fairbanks is planning...
Reductions in sea-ice thickness and summer extent over the past few decades have been particularly pronounced in Alaska. This rapid environmental change coincides with significant socio-economic transformations, including increased ship traffic and offshore oil and gas development. Adaptation and response to these changes and regulation of coastal...
Arctic coastal communities in the Bering Strait region of Alaska (USA) and Chukotka (Russia) share a close relationship with their natural environments that can be characterized as a social–ecological system. This system is complex, featuring changing ecosystem conditions, multiple jurisdictions, migratory animal populations, and several cultures....
