Description

The everyday activities of individuals and communities are Generally channeled and limited by decisions about resource allocation and regulation that are taken beyond the local level. These decisions may or may not be contested and the “beneficiaries” of those decisions may or may not be aware of them. Further, these decisions are made not only by governments, but also by corporations and non-governmental organizations. Information is always used to justify those decisions, but it is often sought after the decision to validate the course taken rather than before the decision to inform it.

In our research in the Andes, we work with community-level decision makers to identify the key issues around which decisions concerning natural resource allocation and regulation are made. Then we identify key institutional market, state, and civil society actors engaged in those issues. We can identify key decision points and critical information used at decision making junctures by analyzing each institution’s desired future conditions, mental causal models of how to achieve those conditions, and then clustering institutions around different aspects of these conditions and causal models.