- Human behaviour in social-ecological systems
- Collective action and common-pool resources
- Complexity perspectives
- Inequalities and the biosphere
- Behavioural experiments (lab and field)
Caroline Schill’s research focuses on human behaviour in complex and intertwined social-ecological systems
Schill is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, based at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In her research, she focuses on human behaviour in complex and intertwined social-ecological systems. She is co-leading the Interacting Complexities focus area at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Her work is strongly anchored in her interest in understanding how our behaviours shape the contexts in which we live, how these contexts in turn shape us and our behaviours, and the implications of these interactions for sustainability. One of Schill's main research questions is how drastic environmental changes and associated uncertainties influence individual behaviour and collective action around shared resources.
Her research is informed by different bodies of literature, most prominently social-ecological systems research, sustainability science, collective action and common-pool resources, behavioural economics, and cognitive, social and cultural psychology. Alongside her empirical work, which strongly relies on behavioural economic experiments (lab and field), she has a keen interest in combining approaches with different perspectives on human action.
She holds a PhD in Sustainability Science and a MSc in Ecosystems, Resilience and Governance, both from Stockholm Resilience Centre (Stockholm University), as well as a MSc (‘Diplom’ in German) from the Business School of the University of Mannheim, Germany.
Schill is a core team member of the Behaviour, Economics and Nature (BEN) research programme at the Beijer Institute, a member of the Beijer Young Scholars II, and part of the first cohort of the Bosch Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership.
Current research projects
- Living with the 'new normal': Exploring human responses to abrupt environmental change in the Arctic using behavioural and interpretive social science (PI)
- Inequality and the biosphere: achieving the sustainable development goals in an unequal world (junior PI)
- Climate change from the small-scale fisher’s point of view: Identifying critical multi-level processes for sustainable small-scale fisheries (combining agent-based modelling and behavioural experiments)
- Improving strategies for dealing with increasing resource scarcity and variability in small-scale fisheries (field experiments in Colombia with partners from University of Magdalena, Santa Marta)
Teaching
Schill is a module leader, together with Nanda Wijermans, for the course "Theories and methods for governance of the commons", which is part of the Stockholm Resilience Centre Master’s programme Social-Ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development.
