Hi!! My name is Michael Schoon, and I’m a researcher in environmental policy at Arizona State University. I am currently the Assistant Director of the Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative, coordinating the research and education on complex adaptive systems at ASU.
The following tabs – research, education, teaching, and so on – delineate my current work. The final tab – “rumblings” – is a more traditional blog that is updated sporadically. Hopefully, I can expand this site to include more non-work related interests as well.
Ultimately, all of my work looks at sustainability. In particularly, I often refer to the sustainability of social-ecological systems. With apologies to those that don’t typically take systems perspectives to study these phenomena, what I’m trying to do is understand the governance systems and institutional design for how people interact with their surrounding environment (both the natural resources that they use and the broader ecosystem). My own area of expertise looks at how groups of people come together to resolve collective action dilemmas concerning environmental issues, especially across some kind of political boundary – whether the boundary is an international frontier, the border between federal agencies, or the jurisdiction between public and private land owners and managers.
