Scaling up community action for tackling climate change

Tackling climate change requires a set of deeply intertwined geographical responsibilities whereby actors at and across different geographical scales are intimately connected. Creating effective strategies requires far more than an invocation for individual behavioural change in thinking globally and acting locally, but attention to the multi‐scalar conflicts, tensions and also opportunities to develop the most appropriate collective responses. In this paper, we use the example of community gardening initiatives in a large UK city to critically interrogate the problems facing groups at the local neighbourhood level in pursuing sustainability agendas. We focus on the organizational imperative to create a multi‐scalar food policy partnership at the city level as a way of confronting dominant global neoliberal urban competitiveness agendas. Our results emphasize the critical importance of scalar politics in enabling effective climate change strategies

UC pursues rooted research with a nonprofit, links the many benefits of community gardens

The informal economy, healthy food options and alternative urban food systems are interconnected in important ways. To better understand these connections, and explore a rooted university approach to working with communities, we collaborated with the San Diego Community Garden Network to analyze the production, distribution and consumption of produce from eight community gardens in San Diego County. The project engaged UC San Diego researchers and students with county residents and community-based organizations to develop a survey together. Interviews with the gardeners and data from the completed survey document the ways in which community gardens contribute to individual and household health, well-being and community development. They suggest that despite perceptions that community gardens have marginal commercial capacity, they have the potential to contribute in meaningful ways to community development, particularly in low-income neighborhoods

Do we need rules for 'what's mine is yours'? Governance in collaborative consumption communities

AbstractWith collaborative consumption, people are provided with access to a good rather than owning it. The current study addresses the problem of regulation in collaborative consumption communities, investigating whether governance increases cooperation, if and why consumers support a governance system and whether supporters and non-supporters differ in their distrust in others. To address these questions, an experiment (within-subject design) was conducted. After reading vignettes, participants indicated how likely they would cooperate and whether they support governance or not—giving reasons for their evaluation. The majority of participants support governance and governance increases cooperation. Supporters argue that humans are egoistic, whereas non-supporters are concerned about negative consequences, asking for alternative incentives. Supporters of governance also differ from non-supporters according to their trust in others. The current study allows valuable recommendation, as more and more sharing networks are created, facing the problem of whether to regulate access or not