1. Theme 4/Week 5: Social Actors and Governance Short Version
Chris Weible, Tanya Heikkila,
Paty Romero-Lankao, and Anu Ramaswami

2. Theme 4: Teaching & Research Objectives Text from Proposal
Research: The study of social actors will comparatively explore general population (households), infrastructure designers and operators, and policy actors’ values and beliefs about global concerns versus local environmental and health priorities (i.e., their sustainability priorities), and their institutional and political capacity to implement relevant actions in cities.
Teaching: Social Actors and theories of change will introduce students to social science theories describing actor behaviors and interactions.

3. Theme 4 Concepts & Skills
Social actors
Infrastructure designers and operators
Energy/infrastructure users
Policy Actors
Institutions (rules)
Priorities, values, beliefs, and interests
Capacity
Frameworks, theories, models
Skills:
Intersubject reliability tests, conceptual development and operationalization, institutional and political analysis, approaches to understanding human cognition and behavior, capacity assessments, research design, and critical thinking

4. Key Hypothesis & Knowledge Gaps
Theme 4. Sustainability priorities & multi-level governance: We posit that current local priorities (water supply, public health) drive low-carbon interventions in Asia rather than global issues such as climate change. Further (as seen in Fig 2), cross-scale linkages among policy actors from the neighborhood to the city to state and national scales are important in governing water-energy-GHG footprints of cities as well as public health risks; such linkages may be weak in smaller cities.
Page 4 PIRE Grant