Community Action, Innovation, and Research for New Societes (CAIRNS) Lab
Principal Investigator: Dr. Benjamin C. Graham
Current Projects
Deliberative Democracy in Action: The Petaluma Fairgrounds Advisory Panel
Partisanship, distrust, fear--the United States is experiencing political division and dysfunction not seen in over a century. An innovative strategy to return decision-making to the public has emerged in Ireland, Canada, Australia, Brazil, the European Union, and elsewhere. These models, often called “citizens’ assemblies”, answer the call for “deeper democracy” built on mutual respect, conflict resolution, and deliberation. They involve democratic lotteries where a random sample of a population are selected to meet, learn, deliberate, and decide on public policy questions--be they local, state, or national. Such models hold incredible promise for the United States, and have been used in Oregon, Michigan, Minnesota, and a handful of other states. Along with Cal Poly Humboldt political science professor Stephanie Burkhalter, the CAIRNS lab is conducting an evaluation of one of the largest U.S. citizens’ assemblies to date, the Petaluma Fairgrounds Advisory Panel.
Community Resilience & Adaptation: Fire Recovery in Northern California
Over the past few decades rising temperatures and associated drier conditions have been attributed to the increased frequency, size, and severity of fires in many regions of California and the broader western US. The intersection of climate change factors, past land management policies, and removal of indigenous burning practices have contributed to novel circumstances with burgeoning costs and wide scale impacts to human communities and ecosystems. There is a need to understand socio-ecological resilience in fire-prone communities.
Socio-ecological resilience involves the capacity of systems to endure, adapt, and influence change in the presence of disruptions and to innovate and transform into new, more desirable configurations in response to disturbance. This perspective highlights the need to think of human communities and ecosystems as coupled systems whose interconnections are essential in fostering resilience. The wildfire-related challenges of northern California provide a unique opportunity to produce and share knowledge cooperatively, employ new approaches to establish, develop, adapt, and enhance engagement across stakeholder communities, and implement ecologically and culturally sound solutions to promote coexistence between people and fire. The main objectives of this study is to briefly review some of the prominent socio-ecological challenges and state of knowledge regarding multidimensional engagement related to fire management, and study three distinct communities impacted by fire. The project employs participatory action research to both study and serve the communities as they reimagine their sense of community and home.
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