This study analyzes public participation in nine regional hearings and six public meetings held by the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy (USCOP) from September 2001 to April 2003. While several researchers have examined whether certain public involvement methods are considered successful or fair, this study characterizes the participants in a...
While discussing what types of campaign finance laws are and are not constitutional in his opinion in McCutcheon v. FEC, 572 U.S. ____ (2014), Chief Justice John Roberts stated that “those who govern should be the last people to help decide who should govern.” His intent was to highlight how...
The Pacific Northwest and Oregon in particular, have a rich fishing history. There are several fishing communities that rely on the resources found within Oregon waters. This research project explores communication in one particular fishing community, the coastal marine recreational fishing community (CMRFC) and the fisheries management community (FMC).
Objectives...
The management of the Northern Rocky Mountains (NRM) gray wolf population is a longstanding controversy that has fueled generations of political and cultural turmoil in the American West. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, wolves were eradicated from the West for the threat...
The last decade has seen a drastic interest in microgrids throughout the world. Even though this trend might seem to be just another technological solution in the energy sector, it is a part of a greater transition from a centralized energy system to a more decentralized one. However, unlike most...
Literature on the evolution of the American higher education system includes a historical and consistent debate over the definition of the higher education mission in the country. Recent debate focuses on mission differentiation between the university and the community college. Acknowledging systemic changes in higher education historically occurred within regions...
Conservation efforts have been increasing in recent years to help preserve threatened coastal and ocean resources. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an important tool to protect and conserve ocean resources. The MPA Center was established to take the lead in developing a framework for a national system of MPAs. The...
Transportation contributes approximately 41 percent of California’s greenhouse gas emissions and 27 percent of national greenhouse gas emissions (CARB, 2019, EPA, 2017). In response to climate change concerns, stakeholders have encouraged the use of electric and hybrid vehicles through tax credits, rebates, and education campaigns. Environmental and transportation justice groups...
Public policy narratives and stories are often referenced by the media, politicians, advocacy groups, and across many disciplines in academia. Studies of social and political narratives support the notion narrative matters, but often lack systematic design capable of producing generalizable findings. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has responded to this...
By 2050 the world population is expected to reach 9 billion. Fears of the impact of such a large population on earth’s environmental systems and finite resources have lead efforts by governmental and non-governmental agencies to assist developing nations in reducing fertility rates to slow population growth by direct medical...
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) have emerged in the last half century as concerning global contaminants. PFASs have been found in drinking water systems causing negative health impacts for those who rely on this as their primary source of drinking water. PFASs are man-made industrial chemicals composed of carbon chains...
Despite their widespread use and presence at all levels of government, public commissions and boards are rarely given much attention, by the general public, academia, or surprisingly by public policy and agency experts. As a state infrastructure governing entity transportation commissions often deal with controversy, but do we really understand...
Background: Calls by presidents and legislators to raise the U.S. college graduation rate to 60% by 2025 have required educational institutions to find ways to increase accessibility and quality while simultaneously reducing costs (Bautsch, 2018; Smith, 2017). Private foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are getting involved...
This study examines the determinants of food consumption behaviors, such as purchasing less meat products, paying attention to how and where food is produced, and reducing food waste within the household. Food consumption is particularly important given that it can often comprise between 10% to 30% of the total household...
Transcending human-defined political and administrative boundaries, the world's transboundary freshwater resources pose particularly challenging management problems. Water resource users at all scales frequently find themselves in direct competition for this economic and life-sustaining resource, in turn creating tensions, and indeed conflict, over water supply, allocation and quality. At the international...
Because the environmental threats are becoming global in scope, international cooperation and global governance issues are in the spotlight. The most controversial environmental law and policy problems arise in the areas where no individual state has sole responsibility for governing, "global commons." Scholars believe that the best way to deal...
The purpose of this research study was to describe and improve understanding of the meaning of institutionalized sustainability and the role that a college president plays in institutionalizing sustainability on a community college campus. The following questions guided the research: (a) What does it mean to have sustainability “institutionalized” at...
Innovation is considered the ultimate drive for business success. Fast growing furniture imports from China have become a controversial topic within U.S. wood and furniture industries. Low-cost production, which is stereotypically considered as the major competitive advantage of the Chinese-made products, has received considerable attention by a large body of...
Policies in Europe over the last half a century have steadily dismantled the inequality-easing processes of the welfare state. Current conditions coupled with concerns related to the recent economic downturn have heightened focus on the issue of income distribution. Education has been identified as a resource to combat such ills....
This study examines the association of household characteristics with forest product consumption and other benefits derived from community forest in Nepal. The analysis is based on random sample data of 80 households from a Community Forest User Groups of Baghmara Community Forestry (BCF) in Nepal. Using an OLS regression to...
Diversity and inclusion represent central challenges and opportunities in the transnational field of higher education, as the number of students enrolled in higher education has expanded exponentially over the past century and universal access to tertiary education has emerged as a development imperative. Within this context, diversity has emerged as...
In the context of expanding global food trade in which we import and consume a variety of foods from across the world, insuring food safety, an essential public health issue, has become a major concern in our food supply system. Over the past several years, food related scandals of Chinese...
This research explores the prospects of legislation in Michigan to authorize statewide use of Overdose Fatality Review Teams (OFRTs) to address the escalating opioid crisis. OFRTs consist of multidisciplinary teams that collaborate for overdose prevention. These teams operate on a local to statewide level and are comprised of individuals from...
The federal government owns 60 percent of Oregon’s forests and, since 1908, has shared proceeds from federal forest timber harvests with counties. These revenues
have provided a relatively stable source of funds for the provision of services by county governments in Oregon. Shared revenues from US Forest Service (USFS)
lands...
This MPP essay examines how states expand access to nutritious food for low-income families, focusing specifically on policies related to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and farmers’ markets. Coalitions made up of nonprofits focused on hunger, farmers, and health collaborate to impact relevant policies in their respective states. The...
This study explores the role of classroom use of live organisms as a pathway for the spread of invasive species. The overall guiding research question is “Are behavioral changes necessary to reduce the spread from the classroom pathway?” Using focus groups comprised of key educators, this study seeks to identify...
Adaptive collaborative (co-) management has received increased recognition as a novel approach to environmental governance that combines the dynamic learning features of adaptive management with the linking and network features of collaborative management. This approach is concerned with fostering sustainable livelihoods and ecological sustainability in the face of uncertainty and...
The shortage of physicians serving rural communities is well documented. To address the rural shortage, medical schools have developed extracurricular programs, called rural health tracks, with an intent to foster medical students’ interest in serving rural communities. While there has been some research about the effects of these tracks, almost...
Since the 1890s, American federalism has been perceived as being unique in the world by having two different levels of government operating within the same jurisdiction without influencing one another. Modern scholars call into question the validity of this basic assumption, but few have published quantitative evidence to reject its...
Eugene Water and Electric Board (EWEB) located in Eugene, Lane County, Oregon, is developing a voluntary landowner incentive program that will provide monetary incentives to non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners in the McKenzie River Watershed, EWEB’s drinking water source for the metropolitan area of Eugene, to promote good stewardship of...
In this work, I address foundational concerns at the interface of institutions, governance structure, transaction costs, and efficiency in public-private contracting. Following transaction cost economic perspective, I build and justify the theoretical models explaining that institutions may affect the economic performance of public-private contracting through the effect of transaction costs....
Improving access to and uptake of antenatal care remains a persistent challenge for India. It is a far greater challenge for an underdeveloped, poorer and mostly rural state like Bihar. The 2015-16 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-IV) of India reported that only 3% pregnant women in rural Bihar utilized full...
Background:
The number of people diagnosed with chronic physical conditions is increasing in the United States. Chronic mental illnesses are also common in the country. Low-income women and those on Medicaid bear a disproportionate burden of chronic conditions and these conditions significantly contribute to obstetric morbidity. Prioritizing preventive measures and...
The spread of invasive species into the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the United States poses a serious threat to the valuable forest resources of the region. Many insects and diseases that are a threat to these forest resources can be transported inside firewood. When campers transport their firewood across borders...
More than half of students in Washington state community colleges enroll in developmental mathematics, but a relatively small percentage of these students persist to the second year. Many students place into these courses and never enroll; others enroll at some point after the first academic term, even when faced with...
Community driven development (CDD) is one of the recent approaches in the development arena that integrates people into mainstream development. Bringing people together into the development prospects through social capital is an important aspect of this approach that harnesses greater social inclusion and wider participation at the grass root level....
Long-haul diesel trucks carry the lion’s share of all shipped goods in the United States. The drivers of these trucks often live in these trucks for days, sometimes weeks, at a time as they deliver these goods. When stopped overnight, many of these drivers leave their engines idling to heat...
The biggest obstacle to a 100% renewable energy utility portfolio is the ability to produce enough electricity to meet peak demand windows, which typically occur in the late afternoon to evening period from 3 pm to 9 pm. A popular policy option to reduce peak demand is time-of-use (TOU) electricity...
Dead wood patterns and dynamics vary with biophysical factors, disturbance history, ownership, and management practices. Through field and modeling studies, I examined the current and potential future amounts of dead wood in two landscapes and region-wide in the Coastal Province of Oregon. The objectives of the first study were to...
The state of Oregon is divided in important ways along rural and urban lines, including the way people make a living, individual and group relationships with the natural world, political ideologies, and personal values. This rural-urban divide has assisted policymakers in making decisions that balance the needs of Oregonians on...
Under the Paris Agreement, parties submitted documents outlining their commitments to climate change mitigation and adaptation, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are set to be updated to increase ambition by 2020. Costa Rica and México are known for their significant national actions on climate change, so comparing these two...
Climate change increases weather unpredictability, threatens communities whose livelihoods depend on natural resources, such as rural communities. Utilizing a Community Capital Framework (Flora and Flora, 2013) and Governance of Complex Adaptive Systems (Duit and Galaz, 2008), this study concentrated on the role of cultural and political capital in supporting rural...
Despite widespread public support for renewable energy development, the siting of wind energy facilities can prove problematic due to opposition from surrounding communities. I propose a unifying framework to explain community response to wind energy development – showing how concepts from environmental sociology related to local biophysical and socioeconomic conditions...
Although dam construction has been an integral tool in development initiatives for nearly a century, dams can have significant negative impacts on local residents, particularly those who are permanently displaced from their homes and must be resettled elsewhere. Dams have unique impacts on indigenous peoples. As a result, many dam...
The Columbia River Treaty (CRT), signed in 1964, is known widely as a successful transboundary river treaty between the United States and Canada. It was designed with a basic dual functional purpose, to increase flood prevention in the lower basin and to maximize hydroelectric power output between the two nations....
Increasing calls from stakeholders for a greater role in public decision making has led to the rapid world-wide adoption of multi stakeholder collaboration for policymaking. In line with this emerging trend the Government of Nepal with support from its long-time development partners and bi-lateral donors initiated a policy level experiment...
Environmental scientists, land managers, and policy actors are increasingly presented with high-stakes high-uncertainty problems stemming from human-ecosystem interactions. To help address these problems, scientists frequently use models that produce enormous geospatial and temporal datasets that are constantly modified and often seek input from communities outside their discipline. To assist scientists—as...
Group Engagement Theory describes the relationship between citizen perceptions of policy, individual identity and status judgements, and individual group engagement decisions. Utilizing a least likely crucial case methodology, this paper uses the case of Josephine County, Oregon to determine the validity of the Group Engagement Theory prediction that citizen identity...
Changes in federal forest management, enactment of environmental policies, recessions and a shift to a global economy dramatically impacted counties between the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s, counties began experiencing a shift away from traditional natural resource extraction activities – amidst changing demographics resulting from rural restructuring taking place...
Recreational fisheries regulations at the state level along the US Atlantic coast are constantly changing to ensure the sustainability of marine fish populations. It is hypothesized that effective management of recreational fishing effort should have a positive impact on fish stocks. Using recreational catch per unit effort (CPUE) as a...