Lorien Jasny
  • Home
  • Projects
  • Contact
Picture
Mental Models in Interdisciplinary Research Teams

Beliefs are not held in a vacuum—individuals create mental models that structure their beliefs. Belief networks are a common key to understanding:
  • how the public responds to new scientific information;
  • why people engage in environmental behaviors ranging from recycling to protest; and
  • what structures underlie successful collective governance programs.


Picture
Adaptive Rangeland Management

With Professors Mark Lubell, Ken Tate, and Leslie Roche (UC Davis), we are exploring the institutional and social factors involved with the adoption and diffusion or innovative grazing practices. This is in collaboration with rangeland ecologists who will use an experimental rangeland to measure changes in ecosystem services under different grazing strategies. Survey data will be collected from California and Wyoming ranchers to understand the factors influencing adaptive decision-making


Picture
Socio-ecological Movements in Urban Ecosystems

This project is a large collaboration in which I am working directly with Professors Mario Diani (University of Trento) and Henrik Ernstson (Stanford, University of Cape Town).  The urban environment of Cape Town is contested along various dimensions of race, class and geography and presents an important case study to (i) learn about collective action processes in newly developing democracies, and (ii) how legacies of apartheid shape the structuring of civic networks. Drawing on a structural and relational network approach, we interviewed 120 civic associations mobilizing on a range of issues, including conservation of animals and habitat, the promotion of urban agriculture, and access to housing, water and sanitation.

Picture
Two Mode Brokerage in Policy Networks
With Professor Mark Lubell (UC Davis) this paper extends to two-mode networks the brokerage concepts developed by Gould and Fernandez (1993) for one-mode networks.   We show that two-mode brokerage chains can be classified according the heterogeneity of the types of nodes included in the chains. We apply two-mode brokerage in the context of water policy networks in San Francisco Bay, California, where two-mode networks represent actors participating in multiple policy processes.  Of particular interest is the role of collaborative institutions, which are hypothesized to involved with the most heterogeneous brokerage structures.







Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.