Minwoo Ahn is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems (SCAS) at Arizona State University. He is working at the Center for Behavior, Institutions, and the Environment. Minwoo's research focuses on understanding the management, governance, and politics of climate change, environmental, and natural resource issues. His research examines the conditions of cooperation and collaboration to solve environmental problems at various levels using diverse methodologies. His research parctiularly focuses on what drives or inhibits behavioral change and stakeholder collaboration to promote sustainable future for human and environment.
His research agenda centers on the following question: under what social-ecological, institutional, and governance conditions do collaborative processes improve (or undermine) social and environmental outcomes? To answer this question, Minwoo primarily investigates three areas of inquiry: (1) How does institutional context shape collaborative processes? (2) How can collaborative governance tools improve collaborative performance? and (3) How can collaborative governance systems maintain legitimacy and democratic accountability from the broader public?
Currently, Minwoo's work concentrates on analyzing the effectiveness of communication in collective action behavioral experiments using computational text analysis and examining the role of leadership in collective action under uncertainty, specifically in the context of the Port of Mars game. Another significant area of research involves environmental politics, focusing on evaluating the legitimacy of policy tools by citizens, including collaboration and regulation, given the presence of bias-prone information environments. In his doctoral dissertation project, Minwoo investigated how diverse stakeholders in collaborative governance perceive and interpret scientific, managerial, and relational uncertainties, and how these perceptions influence collaborative performance in water management and politics. Minwoo employs a variety of research methods, such as computational text analysis, behavioral game experiments, regression-based models, and case studies.
