Kim Winslow
School of Environment and Natural Resources Outreach and Broader Impacts
winslow.52@osu.edu
When we talk about sustainability - whether it’s clean water, conservation planning, or community resilience - the science is increasingly clear on one thing: these challenges are as much social as they are environmental.
Across several recent studies, researchers in the School of Environment and Natural Resources point to the same reality: outcomes depend not only on policies or technologies, but on who is affected, how decisions are made, and how ideas and practices spread within communities.
For example, one study on childhood exposure to air pollution, co-authored by Dr. Kerry Ard, found that Black and Hispanic children experience consistently higher exposure to harmful pollutants during early childhood, a critical period for health and development. These disparities are not explained by income alone, but reflect deeper, place-based inequities. For Extension professionals, this reinforces the importance of grounded, community-specific engagement that recognizes unequal exposure to environmental risks.
Other research by Dr. Jeremy Brooks highlights how conservation success depends not just on funding or policy, but on governance, relationships, and long-term capacity. For instance, one review showed that, even though governance is widely recognized as key to conservation success, very few studies actually measure how different governance structures affect real outcomes on the ground. Another study found that shifting donor priorities can reshape conservation efforts in ways that weaken local institutions over time. Taken together, these studies highlight a familiar Extension principle: how we organize, fund, and partner matters just as much as what we do.
What is Governance?
Governance refers to how decisions get made and carried out—
including who has a voice, how responsibilities are shared, and how rules, norms, and partnerships shape action over time.
In sustainability work, governance isn’t just about formal policies or agencies. It also includes informal agreements, community norms, and relationships that influence how people coordinate, cooperate, and respond to change.
This brings us to a concept that ties many of these ideas together: Cultural Evolution, or CE.
Cultural evolution is the study of how ideas, behaviors, norms, and institutions spread and change over time through social dynamics that play out at multiple scales. Rather than focusing on individuals acting alone, CE looks at groups, relationships, and shared practices, which aligns closely with how Extension work actually unfolds.
In one of the papers that Dr. Brooks helped co-author, researchers describe three core concepts in CE that are especially relevant for sustainability and Extension practice.
The first is social learning - how people learn from each other. This helps explain why peer-to-peer learning, demonstration projects, and trusted local messengers often have greater impact than standalone information campaigns.
The second is cultural adaptation - how communities adjust their norms and practices in response to new challenges like a changing climate or shifting environmental conditions. CE helps us think about which adaptations are likely to endure and spread over time.
The third is cooperation. Many sustainability challenges are collective problems. CE helps explain how cooperation emerges and is sustained through shared norms, rules, and institutions. Organizing action at the group level has the potential to strengthen cooperation and help beneficial practices spread.
Across all of these studies, a common theme emerges, one that shouldn’t come as a surprise to Extension professionals: lasting change depends on equity, governance, learning, and relationships. Sustainability science is increasingly calling for place-based, collaborative, and justice-centered approaches—just the kinds of approaches that Extension professionals excel at facilitating.
Taken together, this research supports the value of Extension’s role as a connector—by bringing evidence and communities together, supporting shared learning, and keeping an eye on the importance of governance, we can help ideas grow in ways that are both locally meaningful and socially lasting.
References
Priem, B., Wodtke, G. T., & Ard, K. (2025). Racial disparities in childhood exposure to neurotoxic air pollution. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 66(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221465251340649
Ayambire, R. A., Rytwinski, T., Taylor, J. J., Luizza, M. W., Muir, M. J., Cadet, C., Armitage, D., Bennett, N. J., Brooks, J., Cheng, S. H., Martinez, J., Nagendran, M., Öckerman, S., Rivera, S. N., Savage, A., Wilkie, D. S., Cooke, S. J., & Bennett, J. R. (2025). Challenges in assessing the effects of environmental governance systems on conservation outcomes. Conservation Biology, 39, e14392. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14392
Brooks, J., Koomen, R., Jørgensen, P. S., Berl, R. E. W., Chávez-Páez, W., Eirdosh, D., Hakim, M. A., Hanisch, S., Lindell, C., Liu, J. H., Nguyen, M.-H. T., Pisor, A., Rogers, D., Romero-Canyas, R., Thulin, E., & Waring, T. M. (2025). A transdisciplinary approach to growing an applied science of cultural evolution for a sustainable future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 380, 20240263. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0263
Eklund, J., Vuola, M., Määttänen, S., Nakamura, K., Brooks, J., & Miller, D. C. (2025). Influence of funding fads and donor interests on international aid for conservation in Madagascar. Conservation Biology, 39, e70122. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70122
Sahle, M., Lahoti, S. A., Lee, S.-Y., Brundiers, K., van Riper, C. J., Pohl, C., Chien, H., Bohnet, I. C., Aguilar-Rivera, N., Edwards, P., Pradhan, P., Plieninger, T., Boonstra, W. J., Flor, A. G., Di Fabio, A., Scheidel, A., Gordon, C., Abson, D. J., Andersson, E., … Takeuchi, K. (2025). Revisiting the sustainability science research agenda. Sustainability Science, 20, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-024-01586-3
Researchers Featured
Dr. Kerry Ard is an Associate Professor in SENR and an environmental sociologist whose work focuses on how air
pollution and other environmental exposures affect human health across the lifespan. Her research blends rigorous public health science with community engagement to understand—and ultimately reduce—environmental health disparities, especially among children and other vulnerable populations.
Dr. Jeremy Brooks is an Associate Professor in SENR and an environmental social scientist
whose work focuses on how people interact with each other and with their environments in sustainable ways. His research integrates insights from psychology, sociology, economics, and evolutionary theory to help answer big questions about conservation, sustainable behavior, and how communities adapt and cooperate over time.