Effective collaboration and cooperation across difference are at the heart of present and future sustainability challenges and solutions. Collaboration among social groups (intragenerational), across time (intergenerational), and across species (interspecies) is each central to achieving sustainability transitions in the 21st century. In practice, there are three types of differences that limit collaboration and cooperation toward sustainability outcomes: differences among social groups, differences across time, and differences across species. Each of these differences have corresponding cognitive biases that challenge collaboration. Social cognitive biases challenge collaboration among social groups; temporal cognitive biases challenge collaboration across time; and anthropocentric cognitive biases challenge collaboration across species. In this work, I present three correctives to collaboration challenges spanning the social, temporal, and species cognitive biases through intervention-specific methods that build beyond traditional framings of empathy, toward social, futures, and ecological empathy. By re-theorizing empathy across these domains, I seek to construct a multidimensional theory of empathy for sustainability, and suggest methods to build it, to bridge differences among people, time horizons, and species for sustainability practice.

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing humanity, and cities are likely to experience many of the most dangerous effects of climate change. One way that cities aim to adapt to become more resilient to climate change is through the provision of locally produced ecosystem services: the benefits that people get from nature. In cities, these ecosystem services are provided by diverse forms of urban ecological infrastructure (UEI): all parts of a city that include ecological structure and function. While there is a growing body of research touting the multifunctionality of UEI and an increasing number of cities implementing UEI plans, there remain important gaps in understanding how UEI features perform at providing ecosystem services and how the local social-ecological-technological context affects the efficacy of UEI solutions. Inspired by the need for cities to adapt to become more resilient to climate change, this dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to understand how diverse UEI features and their ecosystem services are perceived, provided, and prioritized for current and future climate resilience. The second chapter explores how a diverse group of local actors in Valdivia, Chile perceives the city’s urban wetlands and identifies common trade-offs in the perceived importance of different ecosystem services from the wetlands. The third chapter demonstrates species-level differences and trade-offs between common street trees in Phoenix, Arizona in their ability to provide the ecosystem services of both local climate regulation and stormwater regulation. The fourth chapter compares how participatory scenarios from nine cities across the United States and Latin America vary in the degree to which they incorporate UEI and ecosystem services into future visions. The fifth chapter returns focus to Phoenix and illustrates dominant perspectives on the prioritization of ecosystem services for achieving climate resilience and how those priorities change across temporal scales. The dissertation concludes with a synthesis of the previous chapters and suggestions for future urban ecosystem services research. Combined, this dissertation advances understanding of ecosystem services from UEI and highlights the importance of considering trade-offs among UEI features in order help achieve more just, verdant, and resilient urban futures.

The governance of natural resources often gets implicitly or explicitly shaped by the knowledge systems that are invoked for making decisions. These knowledge systems reflect the underlying notions of how human-nature relationships are conceived and operationalized by different stakeholders in the governance system. Conflicts in the science-policy interface in environmental governance arise when specific conceptions of nature dominate over other ways of knowing, when stakeholders with representing different knowledge systems have disproportionate degrees of influence in policymaking spaces, or when certain stakeholders are deracinated from their resources and long-held knowledge traditions. This dissertation examines the epistemic conflicts that exist in the Indian forestry that have led to a situation of policy stalemate in the governance system and continue to perpetuate colonial systems of scientific forestry and marginalize local knowledge traditions. To do so, this dissertation analyzes three datasets to understand the extent and consequences of this conflict in the forestry sciences in Indian academia. First, scientific discourses on the Indian Forest Rights Act are examined to understand the normative and epistemic practices that lead to differences in perspectives and scientific positions on forest governance. Second, the forest policy literature is analyzed using bibliometrics techniques to identify the intellectual and social silos in forestry sciences in India. Third, interview data from Indian forest scientists is analyzed to understand the inequalities within the science-policy interface in Indian forestry and how these perpetuate colonial legacies of forestry science. This dissertation concludes with recommendations and future pathways for knowledge integration and policy deliberations to make more decolonial, inclusive, and sustainable policies in Indian forestry.

Transitioning towards low-carbon energy systems requires participation from a diversity of organizations, governments, and actors. Yet it is still unclear who, when, how much, and what types of participation are needed to realize such transformations. I address this gap by analyzing the role of participation in energy transitions using interviews, participant observation, document analyses, and novel visualization approaches deployed in the USA and Mexican contexts. I offer a framework to explore how engagement in energy transitions unfolds over time and deploy the framework to 1) investigate the role of engagement in decreasing the consumption of gas and electricity at municipal and residential levels in 12 US communities during a three-year competition (2014-2017) organized by Georgetown University; and 2) assess the acceptance and longevity of solar projects that grant electricity access to rural and dispersed Indigenous Ralámuli communities in Chihuahua, México. I found that wider and deeper participation does not always secure lower energy consumption in the US case, which highlights the need to tailor participation for specific goals. Results from Ralámuli communities suggest that the benefits of participation reach a limit; that is, when high participation surpassed the budget (in the form of cash/money and time availability) of solar users, participation became detrimental to user satisfaction and technology acceptance. Lastly, the analysis of how participation occurred in solar home systems with longer longevity (more than five years of use) showed that maintenance and operation costs (e.g. battery replacements) are the greatest barriers to longevity, while knowledge and capacity building might be elements driving longer longevity. Recommendations include: (1) offering clear information in the user’s first language about the costs and maintenance of solar systems, (2) seeking ideas from solar users at the early stages of solar programs, and (3) reducing costs through understanding electricity needs and offering collective forms of ownership. My work expands the theoretical understanding of the role of participation in energy transitions and offers practical resources for practitioners and researchers to facilitate a critical reflection on how participation influences desirable outcomes in different contexts, including communities in the global North and South.