Ahn, Minwoo

Collective action inherently entails political behavior in agroecosystem. While the concept of power has received some attention in the literature, the analysis of how farmers act as a political actor tends to be overlooked. As groundwater politics intensify in California and Arizona due to state-level regulatory frameworks to address groundwater shortage problems, conflicts between farming communities and other stakeholder groups tend to intensify in the process of developing collective solutions. I apply Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to understand the media narratives around farmer’s engagement in collective action. I will analyze local and regional news articles covering this topic using Nexis Uni from 2015 to 2025. Using NPF, this study will code and identify key policy narratives around this issue and focus on farmers engagement in collective action. Further, I will engage in discussions on how NPF can offer us new lens to the study of collective action in agroecosystems.

Inequalities in common-pool resource scenarios and other social dilemmas have received considerable attention from researchers and policymakers. Potential remedies for these inequalities, however, are not well-understood. This study theorizes about the effects of information about inequality on resource users’ decisions, and on downstream outcomes such as whether inequality worsens or improves over time. We argue that the effects of information-based interventions depend upon the ways in which the information is framed, and also on who receives the information (e.g., advantaged resource users versus disadvantaged resource users). We use a framed groundwater game to test our theoretical expectations. The game assigned players’ costs of groundwater extraction at random, generating differential advantages for players within the same group. We also randomly assigned information about inequality. Some players were given information about inequality with a framing meant to prime pro-social motivations, other players were given information about inequality with a framing intended to prime self-interested motivations, and both groups were compared to a pure control group that was given no information about inequality. The experimental results suggest that framing conditions the effects of information on resource users’ decisions, and that policy interventions designed to address inequality through information may have unexpected effects without careful attention to framing or who the recipients of the information are.

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.

Groundwater extraction remains a critical issue worldwide, with overexploitation threatening agricultural sustainability and water security. As policymakers seek ways to encourage more sustainable use of common-pool resources, the role of information has garnered significant attention in nudging individual behaviors toward cooperative outcomes. However, much of this scholarship has narrowly focused on stable state outcomes—particularly cooperative and non-cooperative behaviors—without fully recognizing that decision-making is a dynamic process where behavior exists on a continuum. It is equally important to understand how different information-based interventions can generate significant behavioral shifts toward normatively positive or optimal outcomes. Additionally, previous scholarship in behavioral economics and CPR studies has typically treated information as a homogeneous variable, focusing on whether its presence or absence influences behavior. However, not all forms of information are equal, and they do not influence behavior in the same way. This highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of different information types and their differential effects on behavior.

Our study seeks to address both these gaps through a controlled groundwater extraction experiment to investigate the relative effectiveness of distinct information treatments on individual extraction behavior. Specifically, we employ different types of information regarding the natural state (groundwater availability), the social state (extraction behaviors of other players), with varying levels of certainty and uncertainty. Our results will uncover which types of information prompt the most substantial shifts toward optimal groundwater extraction. These insights have significant implications for policy design and behavioral interventions in addressing the global challenge of groundwater over-extraction.

A growing body of literature highlights the benefits of using classroom games to help students understand policy concepts. In practice, however, instructors often use games as ad-hoc activities to increase student engagement, rather than as an integrated way to consolidate student understanding of core course topics. The goal of this paper is to help instructors design and systematically integrate games into their undergraduate policy courses. Drawing on our experiences as instructors and researchers, we describe how we developed a sequence of games to help undergraduate students understand three of the core concepts in environmental policy, and how we integrated them into our undergraduate courses on environmental policy. We then provide a basic framework for instructors who are interested in designing games that illustrate core policy concepts by simulating real-world policy interactions.