Janssen, Marco

Over a dozen nations have expressed plans to engage in robotic and human missions to the Moon. The Artemis campaign explicitly aims for sustainable exploration, and its current plans include crewed and robotic operations on the lunar surface. With growing interest in lunar surface exploration and sustainability goals, it is important and timely to explore what lunar surface sustainability means. Based on a survey among diverse stakeholder groups, we derive insights into the different dimensions of lunar surface sustainability.
We use the coupled infrastructure systems framework for evaluating lunar surface sustainability. By understanding the interactions of diverse actors in the operations and political economy of moon missions, we aim to identify critical trade-off situations. We will apply the CIS framework to the lunar south polar region, a location of interest for multiple governmental, commercial, and other actors.

Overuse of shared resources is a major concern for many communities. While the positive effect of deliberation and facilitation on collective action outcomes are well-recognized in the literature, there is no conclusive theory on why deliberation improves cooperative outcomes. Studies show that formal mechanism -- rule-based group deliberation – can improve cooperation among resource users, but less is known about the role of informal discourse in shared resource governance. We fill this gap by asking: what is the role of informal discourse in forging cooperation and trust? How formal mechanism intersects with informal mechanism in shaping positive outcomes? We use data from Foraging game that includes 339 rounds of communication from 113 groups and 452 participants. To answer this question, we apply structural topic models to the game dataset. Preliminary analysis suggests that there are different types of informal discourses and that the sequence and timing of informal discourse tend to have influence on cooperative outcomes. We contribute to the theory building on how informal discourse intersects with formal mechanisms in shaping positive outcomes.

Urbanization is a pervasive global phenomenon that continues to significantly transform human-nature interactions, accelerate resource exploitation and pose challenges to effective resource governance. It leads to changes in institutions - or the set of rules and regulations that govern human behavior; fundamentally altering the ways in which people interact and engage in collective action for addressing resource management challenges. Understanding these shifts is crucial for managing the complexities of resource governance in rapidly urbanizing contexts. Behavioral experiments have been valuable in studying individual and collective action, providing deeper insights into the factors that shape social interaction patterns governing shared resource management. However, their potential to elucidate how macro-level phenomenon like urbanization may shape local-level resource governance dynamics is yet to be fully explored.

This study uses experimental data from the implementation of the groundwater game - a resource dilemma game that simulates the effects of individual and collective crop choices on groundwater management. The game was implemented in 300+ villages across 3 arid states in India, the largest user of groundwater in the world. The paper examines the effects of factors like proximity to towns and cities, along with access to road infrastructure and markets, and land holding on cooperation within the game. Results from preliminary analysis show that there is a significant negative relationship between urbanization and cooperation within the game. In other words, communities that are closer to urban centers had lower levels of cooperation for maintaining the shared resource when compared to communities farther away from urban areas. These findings suggest that as urbanization continues to accelerate, it is important to investigate its implications on human behavior, and collective action for addressing environmental challenges.

Resource governance problems are characterized by social dilemmas and complexity of the resource dynamics. Most experimental research on resource management focuses on the social dilemmas participants need to overcome to achieve cooperative outcomes. However, various studies suggest that the understanding of the dynamics of the system may play a role in the performance of groups. There is also evidence that people are more risk averse if uncertainty is caused by decisions of other people instead of uncertainty of nature.
In order to understand the role of resource complexity in more detail, we study the decision-making in a one-person dynamic resource game, varying different types of components of the resource complexity and removing the social dilemma component. Earlier work with single-person decision-making has focused on the understanding of systems dynamics, and the role of information. In this presentation we will present the results of a pre-registered experiment were we focus on additional aspects of resource complexity, that have been explored only in the context of social dilemmas: external shocks, risk of ending round, threshold impacting resource dynamics, and state of the resource. We also test the impact of uncertainty as risk, i.e. known probabilities of certain outcomes, and ambiguity, i.e. unknown probabilities of the outcomes.

The increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are challenging the ability of communities and individuals to recover from such adverse events. Insurance is one way to protect against the financial losses associated with natural hazards. However, insurance policies are becoming less accessible in high-risk areas, impacting households’ ability to cope with natural hazards. These changes in the risk and insurance landscape raise questions about how to manage risk, who should bear the cost of increasing climate-related damages and what are perceptions of fairness when it comes to sharing the costs of risk exposure. We investigate fairness ideals in the contest of insurance choices through an experiment where participants decide whether to subsidize risk in insurance plans. We test whether unequal access to risk reduction investments influences willingness to share the cost of risk. Findings are based on an online behavioral experiment conducted with a U.S. representative sample.