Over the last two decades, increasing attention has focused on the need for collaborative, interdisciplinary research on human actions, cognition, and structures associated with human-environmental interaction at scales ranging from the local to global. One of the activities that has sped the formation of an international community of scholars addressing the human dimensions of global change and other environmental problems has been open meetings of the global research community every two to three years. Originally organized as semi-independent gatherings, open meetings now are organized by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), which is overseen by the International Council of Science (ICSU) with cooperation from the International Social Science Council (ISSC). Core purposes of the open meetings are to assist the IHDP in providing international leadership in framing, developing, and integrating social science research on global environmental change and to promote the application of the key findings of this research. The triennial open meeting helps identify and catalyze new strategic activities, it showcases results from IHDP research, and it facilitates the development and strengthening of international collaborative research efforts. This award provides support for the 7th open meeting of the international human dimensions community, which was held in April 2009 in Bonn, Germany. Open Meeting 2009 was the first under the strategic guidance of the IHDP Strategic Plan for 2007-2015, and provided a platform for the launch of four new scientific initiatives and the synthesis activities of two IHDP core projects. It also instituted the activity portfolios on capacity development and knowledge dissemination. This award provided support for some critical administrative activities to ensure effective operation of the open meeting, and it provided travel assistance for early-career U.S. scholars as well as scholars from developing nations.
Support for the IHDP open meeting facilitates the development of social and behavioral science understandings, conceptualizations, and theoretical enhancements in a number of different fields, such as collective-action problems, discourse analysis, policy processes, and enhanced understanding of the interactions between human societies and the natural environment. The open meeting encourages development of new initiatives and synthesis of findings from past and current research. It also advances the research capacity in the social and behavioral sciences for the conduct of larger-scale, highly interdisciplinary, internationally collaborative research on the human dimensions of global change and related environmental issues, and through this award, the involvement of researchers at early stages in their career and from developing nations is supported.
