About the Center
Environmental problems are multifaceted and complex. They do not arise segmented into the disciplines that typically divide university structures. Solutions to complex environmental problems require insights that draw on numerous disciplines and that link intellectual depth to real-world relevance. Drawing on its breadth and depth in environmental policy, law, social sciences, sciences, and related fields, Duke University has launched the newly established Center for Environmental Solutions to mobilize multidisciplinary thinking and institutional analysis, bridging and strengthening the schools and departments of the university to help generate creative solutions for the most important and complex environmental challenges.
Environmental issues are -- along with closely related topics such as health and genomics -- among the paramount challenges of the future and, at the same time, issues on which Duke University is building its capacity to be a world leader. The Center for Environmental Solutions serves as a network to connect faculty and students in Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, School of Law, Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Fuqua School of Business, Pratt School of Engineering, School of Medicine, Departments of Political Science, Economics, Sociology, and Biology, other schools and departments, related research centers, and colleagues at other universities and research organizations, in an organized mechanism to foster sustained collaborations across administrative and disciplinary boundaries.
Key Themes
Multidisciplinary
Environmental issues invite and necessitate multidisciplinary collaborations. Important environmental challenges such as global change, precautionary regulation, risk analysis, and land use policies inevitably involve interconnections among science, economics, law, politics, and many other fields. Constructive responses require integrated thinking. Too many social responses to environmental challenges, whether in government, the private sector, or academia, have tended to be narrow and therefore to miss important aspects and side effects. Through the Center for Environmental Solutions, nature's complexity can be our strength.
The Center's focus on institutional dimensions implies that much of the Center's emphasis is on policy, law, and social sciences, but the Center's effort to develop integrated understanding and problem-solving capacities implies significant participation by scholars in the physical and life sciences and in the humanities as well. As the list of involved faculty indicates (see People), the Center enjoys participation by faculty in diverse disciplines including economics, political science, public policy, law, decision theory, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, engineering, ecology, botany, biogeochemistry, and atmospheric chemistry. Additional faculty are welcome to participate.
Institutions
The Center's focus on institutions will address the systems, structures, rules, organizations and incentives that shape social interactions and environmental outcomes. This focus on institutions engages experts in the study of government, law, social norms, decision making, policy design, international regimes, and the interplay of science with social science and policymaking, as they bear on environmental issues. The Center runs Duke's ongoing Seminar Series on Environmental Institutions, and Duke's continuing series of annual Colloquia on Environmental Law & Institutions.
A central theme of the Center's research involves testing the hypothesis that "institutions matter." Landmark scholarship has argued that a society's economic prosperity is determined not only by its natural resources, human resources, and technologies, but also or even mainly by its institutions -- its policies, structures and incentives for organizing and shaping social activity. Thus well-endowed societies can falter, and poorly-endowed societies can prosper, depending on their institutions. The Center studies this insight as it relates to environmental outcomes. The Center investigates whether and how environmental performance is determined not only by resources, technologies, rates of economic and population growth, and other commonly asserted factors, but also and perhaps even mainly by institutions. The Center's research brings to bear alternative perspectives on the role of institutions in environmental performance, test the strength of these perspectives as empirical explanations, and attempt to synthesize recommendations for desirable institutional designs to address the environmental challenges of the future.
The Center studies societal institutions of all kinds and at all scales, including governments, civil society, markets, industries, firms, and communities; different branches of government (e.g. legislative, executive, judicial); different levels of institutional authority (e.g. local, regional, national, transnational, global); different types of regulatory instruments (e.g. technology requirements, taxes, subsidies, tradeable permits, information systems, and property rights systems); and comparisons across time, countries, cultures, branches, levels, and types of institutions.
Solutions
The Center's aspiration to solutions helps stimulate constructive, forward-looking, non-partisan, pragmatic responses to environmental questions. Too often debates about environmental issues are cast as static, zero-sum struggles between environment vs. economy, government vs. private enterprise, humans vs. nature. By contrast, the Center for Environmental Solutions, without neglecting (indeed studying carefully) the tradeoffs involved in environmental decisions, focuses its work on the identification and design of creative, dynamic, positive-sum solutions. These include (a) intellectual and technical solutions to theoretical and empirical problems; (b) policy solutions to regulatory and management problems; and (c) institutional solutions to the need for structures that generate successful policies over time and space.
The Duke Center for Environmental Solutions' focus on institutions and solutions nourishes a distinctive approach to identifying and framing environmental questions, but not a single kind of answer. This conceptual approach may help address environmental challenges in a new and potentially powerful way. The Center is both a network for fostering interdisciplinary collaborations on complex problems, and an effort to construct an integrated vision and method for the development of creative and successful responses to such problems.