The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center's video: Collective Motion Collective Action and Collective Decision Making

In this lecture on public goods and common pool resources, Dr. Simon Levin characterizes collective behavior as macroscopic pattern that emerges from microscopic interactions. He notes the temporal and spatial challenges of managing common pool resources, and draws on ideas of discount rate and externalities to help explain decision-making that erodes these resources. He also highlights the parallels between economic and ecological perspectives on collective action to manage public goods, and identifies cooperation and coercion as to concepts in both disciplines that help explain group behavior. Cooperative action to manage public goods in complex adaptive systems at times requires both modularity and poly-centricity, and he emphasizes the organizational challenges that uncertainty brings to collective action. He concludes by emphasizing that managing common pool resources is a foundational challenge for both human and ecological systems, and that patterns of cooperation and collective action will need to be interconnected and scaled up to address global challenges.