Rebecca J. Romsdahl

Applying the learning community model to graduate education: linking research and teaching between core courses

In graduate education, there is often a great divide between classroom learning and research endeavors. Using learning community (LC) values and strategies, our goal is to build stronger and more meaningful ties between these two aspects of graduate education so that students see them as complimentary learning rather than separate components. This article describes a collaborative learning project between two core topics to strengthen links between course concepts and research, raise student interest in regional environmental issues, prepare students for postgraduate success, and help foster LC values. The project requires collaborative learning and integration of individual research to achieve team products, for example, reports and presentations, conference poster, or a manuscript submission to a peer-review journal. Although the LC model is tailored toward undergraduate education, student feedback shows our transfer of its values and strategies into the graduate classroom has been successful in three student cohorts.

The Relationship Between Climate Change Policy and Socioeconomic Changes in the U.S. Great Plains

As the United States struggles with national solutions to climate change, state and local governments have increasingly taken policy action in this area. Although existing research addresses why some places adopt climate change policy while others do not, much of this expresses policies as a function of factors in the present period or recent past, leaving the question of whether current climate change policy can be seen as a lagged response to longer term trends largely unaddressed. Examination of climate change policy as a response to longer term changes expands the existing understanding of why locations choose to be active in this area. Pairing unique climate change policy survey data from more than 200 local Great Plains governments with Census and environmental data from 1990 to 2000, this article examines whether changes in local socioeconomic and environmental factors in the 1990s are associated with climate change mitigation and adaptation policy adoption from the following decade, 2000–2010.

Assessing National Discourse and Local Governance Framing of Climate Change for Adaptation in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT While many national governments struggle to maintain global climate change as a high priority issue, many local governments are taking action to fill the policy gaps. This study examines how local governments across the United Kingdom of Great Britain are reframing climate change. We compiled a dataset of newspaper publications covering climate change over a 10-year timeframe, plus survey and interview responses from local governance practitioners, to identify a shift in national discourse that has changed the priority level of climate change in UK local governance. This paper argues that many local governments are strategically reframing climate change as alternative issues in order to make progress in climate adaptation planning.

Managing the wicked problem of Devils Lake flooding along the US–Canada border

ABSTRACT The flooding of Devils Lake, North Dakota, is a multi-decade, multi-billion-dollar, and yet unsolved water management issue along the US–Canada border. In this study, we define this situation as a ‘wicked problem’ and suggest a ‘green paradiplomacy’–based framework that fosters multiactor, multiscale collaboration across jurisdictions as a management strategy. We interviewed stakeholders and combined their perceptions with currently employed management strategies to assess the potential for green paradiplomacy to address the Devils Lake problem. This study may encourage further discussion of green paradiplomacy as a strategy to manage other transboundary watershed problems along the US–Canada border and elsewhere.

Action on climate change requires deliberative framing at local governance level

Despite successful examples of multilevel government leadership on climate change policy, many local officials still face a variety of barriers, including low public support, low resources, and political division. But perhaps most significant is lack of public discussion about climate change. We propose deliberative framing as a strategy to open the silence, bridge political division, identify common and divergent interests and values, and thereby devise collective responses to climate change.