Members > Michael Schoon

Assistant Professor - School of Sustainability, Arizona State University

Michael Schoon is an assistant professor in Arizona State University's School of Sustainability, focusing on policy and governance in sustainable systems. His dissertation work at Indiana University's Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, focused on transboundary protected areas or Peace Parks in southern Africa which won the American Political Science Association's best dissertation award. Following that, he began as a research associate for the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment, also at ASU, where he continued research on collaboration across borders from those between landowners, governmental agencies, and nation-states. For these projects, he looks at collaborative, cross-border institutional arrangements covering a range of environmental issues from biodiversity conservation to water sharing to fire management in the Arizona borderlands. His work combines multiple methodological approaches and looks at causal clusters for the formation and governance outcomes of institutional arrangements. He continues this work as the lead for the PECS (Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society) working group on collaborative governance.

Dr. Schoon is active in international research communities on resilience, robustness, and complex systems through the Resilience Alliance and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. He serves on the board for IUCN's Transboundary Conservation Specialist Group, which advises academics and practitioners on large-scale, cross-border conservation. Finally, he serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of the Commons, the leading journal in common-pool resource management.

Key research Interests: institutions, collaboration, conservation

Member Since: 2010