Addressing Global Sustainability Challenges from the Bottom Up: The Role of Information Feedback

Abstract

"Global sustainable use of natural resources confronts our society as a collective action problem at an unprecedented scale. Past research has provided insights into the attributes of local social-ecological systems that enable eective self-governance. In this note we discuss possible mechanisms to scale up those community level insights to a larger scale. We do this by combining insights from social-psychology on the role of information feedback with the increasing availability of information technology. By making use of tailored social feedback to individuals in social networks we may be able to scale up the strengths of self-governance at the community level to address global sustainability challenges from the bottom up."