WOW7 Plenaries

WOW7 Plenaries

Our opening plenary set a fantastic tone for WOW7. Thank you to our speakers.

• Dr. Gwen Arnold
• Dr. Ron Oakerson
• Dr. Edella Schlager
• Dr. Abby York

Photos from the plenary:

Dr. Gwen Arnold

Gwen Arnold is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at University of California, Davis. She graduated from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2012, with a Joint PhD in Public Policy. She spent one year in the Department of Political Science at University of Cincinnati before joining the UC Davis faculty.

Her research program investigates the role of agency in the policy process, focusing on local government decision-making and policy entrepreneurship. She explores these issues across a range of substantive topics, including on high-volume hydraulic fracturing governance, wetlands management, legal cannabis regulation, city responses to climate change-associated hazards, and hydrogen energy transitions. She has published more than 30 peer-reviewed academic articles in top outlets such as Policy Studies Journal, Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Policy Sciences, and Review of Policy Research.

At UC Davis, Gwen co-directs the Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior and is lead faculty advisor for the Environmental Policy, Analysis, and Planning undergraduate major. Gwen is also Associate Editor and Short Articles Editor at Policy Studies Journal, the flagship journal for the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) Section.

Gwen’s awards include the 2016 John Kincaid Publius Best Article Award, 2018 UC Davis Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring, 2021 Emerging Scholar Award from the APSA STEP Section, 2023 UC Davis Walker Academic Advising Award, 2023 UC Davis Spring Undergraduate Commencement Speaker, and 2023 Excellence in Faculty Advising Award from the National Academic Advising Association Region 9.

Outside of work, Gwen is a committed animal lover who has volunteered at Homeward Bound, a local dog rescue, for the past ten years. Her family has three dogs, three fish, and two cats, and previously had three chickens (RIP chickens). She and her husband, Ken, have three children: Kenny (13), Jordan (9), and Sadie (8). Raising them has made Gwen a professional at hiding vegetables in other foods (the key is to remove all the green peel from zucchini and then grate it) and semi-professional at icing sports-themed sugar cookies.

Dr. Ron Oakerson

Ron Oakerson is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Houghton University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Indiana University in 1978, working with Vincent Ostrom as his dissertation chair. He was a member of the Panel on Common Property Resource Management organized by the National Academy of Science in the mid-1980s and a Senior Analyst for metropolitan studies at the US Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) from 1985 to 1988. He returned to IU in 1988 to serve as a senior scholar with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and accepted a faculty position at Houghton in 1992, retiring in 2018.

Dr. Oakerson’s work as an institutionalist in the Workshop tradition has focused in three principal areas: theory of the commons, the study of local public economies, and localization in international development. As a member of the NAS Panel on Common Property Management, his framework paper was used to collect case studies of the commons from around the world and published as “Analyzing the Commons: A Framework” in Making the Commons Work (ICS Press, 1992). He was a founding member of the International Association for the Study of the Commons and continues as a member of the editorial board for the International Journal of the Commons. His more recent work on the commons is urban-focused, collaborating with Jeremy D.W. Clifton to publish “The Neighborhood as Commons: Reframing Neighborhood Decline” in the Fordham Urban Law Journal (Vol. XLIV, May 2017). At the ACIR, he was joined by Workshop scholar Roger B. Parks to produce case studies of two polycentric metropolitan counties, St. Louis County, Missouri, and Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, reversing the ACIR’s long-standing support for extensive metropolitan consolidation and leading to numerous articles, co-authored with Parks, in Publius, Urban Affairs Quarterly, and other journals. His subsequent book, Governing Local Public Economies, was published by ICS Press in 1999. While a member of the Workshop research staff in the early 1990s, he served as a consultant on policy reform to the USAID mission in Cameroon and continued as a consultant to USAID’s Africa Bureau on issues of governance and democracy into the late 1990s. Since 2009, he has led a series of faculty-student field research projects in Sierra Leone, focusing from 2017 to the present on development issues in a recently restored—and very remote—traditional chiefdom (see www.kalanthuba.com for details). Post-retirement, he has been revisiting his initial work on the commons, completing a book-length manuscript on the epistemology that underlies commons research.

Dr. Edella Schlager

Dr. Edella Schlager received her PhD in Political Science from Indiana University. Schlager’s research focuses on the design of institutional arrangements and how the interaction between institutional design and context affects performance in relation to watershed governance in the US. In 2022, she received the Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association. She is a member of the National Academy of Public Administration.

My research focuses on comparative institutional analyses of water laws, policies, property rights, and compacts in the western US. I am particularly interested in the design and performance of polycentric systems of water governance and how well such systems of water governance adapt to changing environmental, legal, and social circumstances. Journals I have published in include Land Economics, Policy Studies Journal, Publius, and the American Journal of Political Science. I am co-author of two books on western water governance, Common Waters, Diverging Streams: Linking Institutions and Water Management in Arizona, California, and Colorado (with William Blomquist and Tanya Heikkila); and Embracing Watershed Politics (with William Blomquist). I am also the lead editor of Navigating Climate Change Policy: The Opportunities of Federalism (with Kirsten Engel and Sally Rider).

My teaching centers on environmental policy and public policy. I teach both undergraduate and graduate survey courses on environmental policy, an undergraduate course on climate change policy; and a PhD seminar on theories of the policy process.

Dr. Abby York

Dr. Abigail York is a Professor of Governance and Public Policy and Director of Graduate Studies at Arizona State University's School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Over the past two decades, Abigail has established a research program focused on the governance of social-ecological systems at various scales, from local to global. With more than $50 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and United States Department of Agriculture, she leads large transdisciplinary teams exploring the underlying factors driving collective action.

As the lead Principal Investigator of ARC-NAV (Arctic Robust Communities-Navigating Adaptation to Variability), York researches environmental governance and collective action in communities facing rapid change in Chukotka and Kamchatka, Russia, and Alaska, USA. Collaborating with local and Indigenous communities, her team co-designs adaptive governance structures. She is also a Co-Principal Investigator for the Alaska Coastal Cooperative (AC³TION) project, led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and in collaboration with eight coastal communities, which focuses on adaptation to climate change-related challenges the Arctic such as coastal erosion, flooding, and permafrost thaw.

York co-leads the Earth System Science for the Anthropocene (ESSA) graduate training initiative, which trains scholars in transdisciplinary approaches to tackle Anthropocene challenges. The program emphasizes diverse perspectives and collaboration with rightsholders and stakeholders to solve complex problems.

In all aspects of her work, Abigail is committed to addressing environmental justice challenges and advancing sustainable governance solutions centered on the voices and knowledge of the communities most affected. In her personal life, she values quality time with her husband, Zach, and their three children: Zephyr, Juniper, and River. The kids are active in club swimming, so weekends, mornings, and evenings are often spent at the pool!