Publications

Schill, C., J. M. Anderies, T. Lindahl, C. Folke, S. Polasky, J. C. Cárdenas, A.-S. Crépin, M. A. Janssen, J. Norberg, and M. Schlüter. 2019. A more dynamic understanding of human behaviour for the Anthropocene. Nature Sustainability 2:1075–1082.

Human behaviour is of profound significance in shaping pathways towards sustainability. Yet, the approach to understanding human behaviour in many fields remains reliant on overly simplistic models. For a better understanding of the interface between human behaviour and sustainability, we take work in behavioural economics and cognitive psychology as a starting point, but argue for an expansion of this work by adopting a more ...

Haider, L.J., Hentati-Sundberg, J., Giusti, M. et al. 2017. The undisciplinary journey: early-career perspectives in sustainability science. Sustain Sci. 13: 191. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-017-0445-1

The establishment of interdisciplinary Master’s and PhD programs in sustainability science is opening up an exciting arena filled with opportunities for early-career scholars to address pressing sustainability challenges. However, embarking upon an interdisciplinary endeavor as an early-career scholar poses a unique set of challenges: to develop an individual scientific identity and a strong and specific methodological skill-s...

Hamann, M., Berry, K., Chaigneu, T., Curry, T. et. al. 2018. Inequality and the Biosphere. Annual Review of Environment and Resources Vol. 43:- (Volume publication date October 2018) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-102017- 025949

Rising inequalities and accelerating global environmental change pose two of the most pressing challenges of the twenty-first century. To explore how these phenomena are linked, we apply a social-ecological systems perspective and review the literature to identify six different types of interactions (or “pathways”) between inequality and the biosphere. We find that most of the research so far has only considered one-directiona...

Haider, L.J., Hentati-Sundberg, J., Giusti, M. et al. 2017. The undisciplinary journey: early-career perspectives in sustainability science. Sustain Sci. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-017-0445-1

The establishment of interdisciplinary Master’s and PhD programmes in sustainability science is opening up an exciting arena filled with opportunities for early-career scholars to address pressing sustainability challenges. However, embarking upon an interdisciplinary endeavor as an early-career scholar poses a unique set of challenges: to develop an individual scientific identity and a strong and specific methodological skill...

Lindahl, T., A.-S. Crépin, C. Schill. 2016. Potential disasters can turn the tragedy into success. Environmental and Resource Economics65: 657 – 676.

This paper presents a novel experimental design that allows testing how users of a common-pool resource respond to an endogenously driven drastic drop in the supply of the resource. We show that user groups will manage a resource more efficiently when confronted with such a non-concave resource growth function, compared to groups facing a logistic growth function. Even among cooperative groups there is a significant behavioral...

Schill, C., Wijermans, N., Schlüter, M., Lindahl, T., 2016. Cooperation Is Not Enough—Exploring Social-Ecological Micro-Foundations for Sustainable Common-Pool Resource Use. PLOS ONE 11, e0157796. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0157796

Cooperation amongst resource users holds the key to overcoming the social dilemma that characterizes community-based common-pool resource management. But is cooperation alone enough to achieve sustainable resource use? The short answer is no. Developing management strategies in a complex social-ecological environment also requires ecological knowledge and approaches to deal with perceived environmental uncertainty. Recent beha...

Nyborg, K., Anderies, J.M., Dannenberg, A., Lindahl, T., Schill, C., Schlüter, M., Adger, W.N., Arrow, K.J., Barrett, S., Carpenter, S., et. al. 2016. Social norms as solutions. Science 354, 42–43.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, antibiotic resistance, and other global challenges pose major collective action problems: A group benefits from a certain action, but no individual has sufficient incentive to act alone. Formal institutions, e.g., laws and treaties, have helped address issues like ozone depletion, lead pollution, and acid rain. However, formal institutions are not always able to enforce collectively desirable...

Schill, C., T. Lindahl, A.-S. Crépin. 2015. Collective action and the risk of ecosystem regime shifts: Insights from a laboratory experiment. Ecology and Society 20(1): 48.

Ecosystems can undergo regime shifts that potentially lead to a substantial decrease in the availability of provisioning ecosystem services. Recent research suggests that the frequency and intensity of regime shifts increase with growing anthropogenic pressure, so understanding the underlying social-ecological dynamics is crucial, particularly in contexts where livelihoods depend heavily on local ecosystem services. In such se...