Cultural evolution and US agricultural institutions

This paper presents a study of the emergence of environmental management institutions in Maine's blueberry industry. We follow a cultural evolutionary approach to understand the factors that influenced the emergence of these institutions in environmental collective action problems. Specifically, we use a cultural multilevel selection framework to explore the prediction that collective action and institutions of environmental management emerge when cultural selection is the strongest among social groups positioned to solve a given collective action problem. To do this, we construct an evidence typology suited for a historical evolutionary analysis. We find that the scale of cultural adaptation responded to scale of the most pressing adaptive problem. The case study provides support for the group-level selection theory of institutional evolution, and displays patterns of institutional adaptation that respond to changing conditions over time. We argue that the dominant level of selection concept in multilevel selection theory helps to clarify how matches and mismatches between resource scale and institutional scale arise. We conclude that cultural evolutionary theory provides a general causal framework for organizing evidence, and complements the study of environmental history, which provides the temporal depth needed to examine evolutionary hypotheses

Action (physics · Adaptation (eye · Biology · Collective action · Construct (python library · Economic geography · Economics · Environmental resource management · Geography · Political science · Scale (ratio · Selection (genetic algorithm · Sociology · Typology · Computer Science · Organic Food and Agriculture · Psychology · Wine Industry and Tourism · Ecology

• Socio-hydrology

  Open Access•David J Yu, Heejun Chang et al.•Conservation Ecology•2020

  Añadir item

• Governing the Commons

  Open Access•Elinor Ostrom, Элинор Остром•Governing the Commons•1990

  Añadir item

• Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

  Open Access•Alex Mesoudi, A Whiten et al.•Behavioral and Brain Sciences•2006

  Añadir item

• Grandparental investment

  Open Access•David A Coall, Ralph Hertwig•Behavioral and Brain Sciences•2010

  Añadir item

• Governing the Commons

  Open Access•Elinor Ostrom, Элинор Остром•Governing the Commons•2015

  Añadir item

• The Logic of Collective Action

  Mancur Olson•Logic of Collective Action•1965

  Añadir item

• In Order to Aid in Diffusing Useful and Practical Information

  Open Access•David W Cash•Science Technology & Human Values•2001

  Añadir item

• Scale Mismatches in Social-Ecological Systems

  Open Access•Graeme S Cummings, David H M Cummings et al.•Conservation Ecology•2006

  Añadir item

• A multilevel evolutionary framework for sustainability analysis

  Open Access•Timothy M Waring, Michelle A Kline et al.•Conservation Ecology•2015

  Añadir item