The effects of observed and future changes in climate are spatially and socially differentiated. The impacts of future changes will be felt particularly by resource-dependent communities through a multitude of primary and secondary effects cascading through natural and social systems. Given that the world is increasingly faced with risks of climate change that are at the boundaries of human experience3, there is an urgent need to learn from past and present adaptation strategies to understand both the processes by which adaptation takes place and the limitations of the various agents of change – states, markets, and civil society – in these processes. Societies have inherent capacities to adapt to climate change. In this article, I argue that these capacities are bound up in their ability to act collectively.

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Social Capital, Collective Action, and Adaptation to Climate Change

In the context of the apparent closure of neoliberalism, I can think of no more profoundly humanist statement than “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dom...

A Sociological Imagination

The empirical evidence in the papers in this special issue identifies pervasive and difficult cross-scale and cross-level interactions in managing the environment. The complexity of these interactions and the fact that both scholarship and management have only recently begun to address this complexity have provided the impetus for us to present one synthesis of scale and cross-scale dynamics. In doing so, we draw from multiple cases, multiple disciplines, and multiple perspectives. In this synthesis paper, and in the accompanying cases, we hypothesize that the dynamics of cross-scale and cross-level interactions are affected by the interplay between institutions at multiple levels and scales. We suggest that the advent of co-management structures and conscious boundary management that includes knowledge co-production, mediation, translation, and negotiation across scale-related boundaries may facilitate solutions to complex problems that decision makers have historically been unable to solve.

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Guest Editorial, part of a Special Feature on Scale and Cross-scale Dynamics Scale and Cross-Scale Dynamics: Governance and Information in a Multilevel World

He has been cited by "The New York Times Magazine" as "probably the most important economist in the world" and by Time as "the world's best-known economist." He has advised an extraordinary range of world leaders and international institutions on the full range of issues related to creating economic success and reducing the world's poverty and misery. Now, at last, he draws on his entire twenty-five-year body of experience to offer a thrilling and inspiring big-picture vision of the keys to economic success in the world today and the steps that are necessary to achieve prosperity for all. Marrying vivid eyewitness storytelling to his laserlike analysis, Jeffrey Sachs sets the stage by drawing a vivid conceptual map of the world economy and the different categories into which countries fall. Then, in a tour de force of elegance and compression, he explains why, over the past two hundred years, wealth has diverged across the planet in the manner that it has and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the cruel vortex of poverty. The groundwork laid, he explains his methods for arriving, like a clinical internist, at a holistic diagnosis of a country's situation and the options it faces. Rather than deliver a worldview to readers from on high, Sachs leads them along the learning path he himself followed, telling the remarkable stories of his own work in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, China, and Africa as a way to bring readers to a broad-based understanding of the array of issues countries can face and the way the issues interrelate. He concludes by drawing on everything he has learned to offer an integrated set of solutions to the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that most frequently hold societies back. In the end, he leaves readers with an understanding, not of how daunting the world's problems are, but how solvable they are-and why making the effort is a matter both of moral obligation and strategic self-interest. A work of profound moral and intellectual vision that grows out of unprecedented real-world experience, "The End of Poverty" is a road map to a safer, more prosperous future for the world. From "probably the most important economist in the world" ("The New York Times Magazine"), legendary for his work around the globe on economies in crisis, a landmark exploration of the roots of economic prosperity and the path out of extreme poverty for the world's poorest citizens.

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The end of poverty: economic possibilities for our time.

Community governance is the set of small group social interactions that, with market and state, determine economic outcomes. We argue (i) community governance addresses some common market and state failures but typically relies on insider-outsider distinctions that may be morally repugnant and economically costly; (ii) the individual motivations supporting community governance are not captured by either selfishness or altruism; (iii) communities, markets and states are complements, not substitutes; (iv) when poorly designed, markets and states crowd out communities; (v) some distributions of property rights are better than others at fostering community governance; and (vi) communities will probably increase in importance in the future.

Social Capital and Community Governance

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Dion Dennis

Papers

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed