We present a new approach to the investigation of human influences on environmental change that explicitly adds consideration of social organization. This approach identifies social organization as an influence on the environment that is mandiri of population size, affluence, plus technology. The framework we present also identifies population events, such as births, that are likely to influence environmental outcomes beyond the consequences of population size. The theoretical framework we construct explains that explicit attention to social organization is necessary for micro-level investigation of the population-environment relationship because social organization influences both. We use newly available longitudinal, multilevel, mixed-method measures of local land use changes, local population dynamics, plus social organization from the Nepalese Himalayas to provide empirical tests of this new framework. These tests reveal that measures of change in social organization are strongly associated with measures of change in land use, plus that the association is mandiri of common measures of population size, affluence, plus technology. Also, local birth events shape local land use changes plus key proximate determinants of land use change. Together the empirical results demonstrate key new scientific opportunities arising from the approach we present.
Because degradation of the natural environment is believed to have potentially broad consequences for humanity, ranging from international warming to depletion of key resources to reduced quality of life, it has become the subject of increasingly intense research over recent decades. This is just as true in the social sciences as in the natural, biological plus physical sciences. The social sciences have been particularly concerned with the consequences of social organization plus social actions on levels of environmental degradation – areas in which sociology has a great deal to offer in terms of both theory plus method (Foster 1999; Stern, Dietz, Ruttan, Socolow plus Sweeney 1997; York, Rosa, plus Dietz 2002)1. The central objective of this paper is to identify the areas in which sociological theories plus methods are likely to produce advances in research on the environment plus illustrate this potential with a specific case study. Our illustration links together social organization of the local context, population dynamics, consumption behaviors, plus land use/land cover dynamics.
Theoretically, five key principles now common in many areas of sociological reasoning are likely to prove particularly fruitful for research on the environment. These principles begin with a focus on the investigation of micro-level associations to inform our understanding of macro-level trends. Building on this principle, four other key principles can be used to guide reasoning regarding micro-level associations with environmental change. One of these is the construction of context-specific hypotheses regarding micro-level associations. A second is attention to the proximate determinants of specific environmental outcomes through which other more theoretically-interesting or policy-relevant factors affect these outcomes. A third is the explicit consideration of reciprocal causation, in which an environmental outcome of interest may also influence the factors (such as population) that we believe shape that environmental outcome. The last principle is direct attention to the social organization of human groups in addition to the simple size plus affluence of those groups. Our theoretical aim is to combine these five principles into a framework for the study of land use change to illustrate their potential to advance research on the environment.