Marco A. Janssen

Our societies experience unprecedented challenges to sustain coupled infrastructure systems to produce nutritious food, clean fresh water and reliable clean energy. I want to understand how collective action problems can be addressed in those coupled infrastructure systems while enhancing the robustness to external challenges such as globalization and climate change.

I explore whether experimental games can be effective intervention tools to enhance self-governing solutions in rural India . What is the effect of globalization on vulnerability of rural communities to climate change? How do we navigate short term political targets to meet long term planetary boundaries? And how do we represent human behavior in line with empirical evidence in computational models of social-ecological systems?

To address these questions I combine behavioral experiments, agent-based modeling, and case study analyses.

Graduate and undergraduate students involved with my research participate in the Center for Behavior, Institutions, and the Environment where we study the governance of social-ecological systems.

My students are enrolled in various programs at ASU such as Environmental Social Science and Sustainability.