Growing awareness of the magnitude and character of environmental change on a global scale has led to increasing concern about how individuals and institutions will respond to such changes and develop collective responses that reduce or eliminate harmful human actions or that alleviate the detrimental impacts of such changes. This project will initiate a long-term research program to evaluate the processes by which societies collectively learn about global environmental risks. Following analysis of previous studies of the ways in which societies have learned about these types of risks, the investigator will identify obstacles that impeded the learning process and will propose organizational and managerial initiatives that might reduce those obstacles. The latter objectives will be undertaken through comparative case studies of the roles of six critical sets of actors (scientists, governments, international governmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and the media) in social learning about three specific environmental risks (climate change, ozone depletion, and acid-oxidant pollution) in seven nations (U.S.A., U.S.S.R., United Kingdom, Federal Republic of Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and India). This initial project will focus on development of the general theory and refinement of case-study analytic procedures in the U.S.A. and Germany. This proposal will expand general understandings of the ways in which human institutions respond to global environmental change in a number of critical ways. It will expand general theory regarding the ways in which organizations learn and respond to large-scale problems, and it will provide specific demonstrations of the ways in which investigative approaches used in ecology, economics, sociology, and geography can be integrated. While providing specific insights about this problem in the U.S. and Germany, the project also will lay a sounder foundation for more elaborate projects dealing with more nations and a broader range of issues, thereby enhancing prospects for future research both by this investigator and by others.
