As part of the Fellowship, Natalie Struwe will spend two years at The Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University Bloomington, where she will collaborate with a multidisciplinary team - Jessica Steinberg, Andreas Bueckle, Eduardo Brondizio, and Jimmy Walker - whose combined scientific expertise spans the governance of natural resources, socio-ecological systems, collective action problems, and VR development. The research stay abroad will be followed by a one-year return phase at Universität Innsbruck.
Her research project develops innovative tools to bring nature to people and thereby promote conservation preferences and behaviors. Using virtual reality (VR) headsets, participants are taken on virtual field-trips through ecosystems. They experience first-hand how human well-being depends on the health of nature today, and how it could look in the future depending on alternative paths of conservation actions within societies. The central question is whether such vivid, first-person encounters with nature may promote people’s cooperation in protecting shared natural resources and their willingness to support conservation policies.
VR technology offers a unique opportunity to connect people with nature they may never be able to experience in person due to geographic or economic barriers. Similarly, participants can experience the global dimension of nature conservation: illustrating how human well-being depends on the state of distant ecosystems, such as tropical rainforests, even for those of us living far away from them. What will be explored is the potential of VR as an innovative educational and engagement tool to promote the values and behaviors needed to protect the planet’s ecosystems for the current and future generations.
To assess the impact of these VR nature field-trips, economic experiments will be conducted that measure participant’s real behaviors in strategic group cooperation games, as well as in real-life conservation decisions. The economic decisions will be jointly analyzed with behavioral data from users while in VR. This allows to draw causal conclusions about the public’s preferences, values, and political attitudes toward nature conservation.