Alaska's rural communities are slipping off the face of the Earth. Rising sea levels, increasingly strong seasonal storms, and melting permafrost have put many villages throughout the state in intense danger. Yet despite generally shared cultural, economic, geographical, and demographic characteristics, Alaska?s most dramatically imperiled communities demonstrate remarkable divergence in their response to the disaster bearing down on them. More specifically, they have formulated, mobilized, and employed claims for recognition and assistance in a variety of ways. Why is the same phenomenon affecting these remote Arctic communities so differently? What determines a community?s capacity for resilience and adaptation in the face of a catastrophic event? Are there reasons to expect that this answer will be different under conditions of urgent crisis versus chronic crisis? In particular, how can this crisis serve as precisely the incentive some communities need to resolve their collective action problems even as that same crisis serves to create collective action problems in others?
This research investigates this puzzling and critically important empirical divergence by exploring how and under what conditions the sustained, routinized, total shock of catastrophic disaster challenges and transforms long-standing dynamics of power and order in besieged communities, and how those transformations in turn reshape patterns of collective action and institutional adaptation and change. The project thus represents a significant contribution to a critical puzzle in social science inquiry: the question of institutional origins. By tracing the ideological and political process of responding to anticipated shock and profound change, not simply analyzing adaptation to such shocks after they have occurred, this research will shed new light on how and why chronic crisis can generate unique opportunities for collective action, social resilience, and institutional innovation at the local level.
The conclusions of this study will have immediate practical applications for the geographically endangered and socio-economically marginalized Native Alaskan communities at the center of the study and well beyond them. By investigating different village-level efforts in Alaska, this study will ultimately assist in a greater coordination of efforts and the collective search for broader solutions for imperiled communities around the world who are coping with the very real challenges of dramatic environmental change.
Due to unexpected contingencies, the planned research was not completed in the time period covered by this grant. Original Project Summary Problem statement: Alaska’s rural communities are quietly slipping off the face of the Earth. Rising sea levels, increasingly strong seasonal storms, and melting permafrost have put most of the state’s coastal communities in danger of complete or nearly-complete obliteration. Despite shared cultural, economic, geographical, and demographic characteristics, Alaska’s four most dramatically imperiled communities demonstrate remarkable divergence in their responses to the disaster bearing down on them. More specifically, they have formulated, mobilized, and employed claims for recognition and assistance according to dramatically divergent logics along a continuum from economically- driven, carefully staged emigration to ethnically-framed bids for historically-justified relief and rescue. This proposed research will explore how the permanent crisis of climate change represents a comprehensive and genuinely exogenous shock to the social and political status quo, and investigate how such game-changing conditions of chronic, routinized crisis can turn "good" social capital bad and undermine existing strategies of collective action and resilience. Methods and analysis: Over the course of this research, the researcher will visit four village sites in rural Alaska to administer a survey, choose and interview key informants, and conduct a series of ethnographic interviews with a representative sample of households in each village. Inferential statistics will be used to analyze and test the survey data, and qualitative content analysis will be employed to analyze the interview data. Intellectual merit: This research represents a significant contribution to a critical puzzle in social science inquiry: the question of institutional origins. By tracing the ideological and political process of responding to anticipated shock and profound change, not simply documenting adaptation to such shocks after they have occurred, this research will shed new light on how and why permanent crisis de-exceptionalizes disaster and creates unique opportunities for institutional innovation at the local level. This will be one of the first—if not the first—major studies to examine what matters most in complex, historically informed intersections of public and private actors who are operating under very uncertain conditions and in a nearly permanent state of environmental emergency, and how those actors consequently imagine and construct new institutional solutions. Broader impacts: This research will contribute to the doctoral training of a female doctoral student, and has immediate practical applications for the geographically endangered and socio-economically marginalized Native Alaskan communities at the center of the study. The researcher will collaborate and share her work with village leaders and Native Alaskan corporations and social organizations, as well as environmental organizations and state actors outside of the villages. She will also extensively present her findings, including photographic and video evidence, to the academic and nonprofit communities upon completion of the fieldwork. By documenting different village-level efforts in Alaska and beyond, this research will assist in a greater coordination of efforts and the collective search for broader solutions for marginalized communities around the world who are coping with the very real challenges of dramatic climate change.
