The purpose of the United Nations-guided process to establish Sustainable Development Goals is to galvanize governments and civil society to rise to the interlinked environmental, societal, and economic challenges we face in the Anthropocene. We argue that the process of setting Sustainable Development Goals should take three key aspects into consideration. First, it should embrace an integrated social-ecological system perspective and acknowledge the key dynamics that such systems entail, including the role of ecosystems in sustaining human wellbeing, multiple cross-scale interactions, and uncertain thresholds. Second, the process needs to address trade-offs between the ambition of goals and the feasibility in reaching them, recognizing biophysical, social, and political constraints. Third, the goal-setting exercise and the management of goal implementation need to be guided by existing knowledge about the principles, dynamics, and constraints of social change processes at all scales, from the individual to the global. Combining these three aspects will increase the chances of establishing and achieving effective Sustainable Development Goals.
The effects of social information and luck on risk behavior of small-scale fishers at Lake Victoria
(2022)
We use a lab-in-the-field experiment to examine how personal experience of good or bad luck and information about the behavior of others influence the risk taking behavior of small-scale fishers in Tanzania. These fishers make many risky decisions in their daily lives, and a better understanding of the factors influencing risky decisions is important from both a policy and scientific perspective. Our results show a slight tendency for fishers to take more risk in a lottery if they have been unlucky in another game shortly before. Risk taking is enhanced by social information when fishers learn that others have taken more risk. This is true although risks are independent and the fishers do not know whether the risk taking of others has ultimately paid off.
