Environmental Social Sciences

Research & Impact

Environmental Behavioral Sciences

The wide range of approaches within EBS can be organized as follows: the study of human behavior, human ecology, and human institutions as they pertain to sustainability:

  • The study of human behavior: Includes a wide range of social and behavioral science disciplines, such as environmental, cultural, social, and cognitive psychology, as well as cognitive science and decision science.
  • The study of human ecology: Includes geography, history, archeology, political ecology, demography, and anthropology, as well as research on cultural evolution, resilience, and complexity.
  • The study of human institutions: Includes political economy, those who study global political institutions, environmental sociology, law, education, and organizations.

Meet our faculty

 

Global Environmental Policy

The GEP faculty’s research, teaching, and outreach activities are motivated by the following broad set of questions: How do we design and implement policies and institutions that jointly improve environmental and human outcomes? Which institutional and policy approaches are politically feasible, and which are equitable? How do changes in technology or changes in the physical environment alter which policies and institutions are likely to be effective? How do we develop better methods to aid in the design, evaluation, or implementation of policy? We are interested in policy-oriented sustainability solutions across a variety of scales, from the level of the firm all the way to questions of global governance, and are interested in policy-oriented solutions in both the public and private sector. Our methods and approaches span multiple disciplines, including theoretical and empirical tools from economics and political science, modeling approaches from systems engineering, and statistical tools from data science and machine learning.

Meet our faculty