Ursula Kreitmair: 2021 Great Plains conference

"How to Design Climate Policy in a Polarized World" with Ursula Kreitmair, UNL Political Science. Culture is a main determinant of how we think and feel about climate change. As such, culture must be considered when designing mitigation and adaptation strategies to meet the rapid emission reductions necessary to avert the most damaging of climate impacts. Cultural cleavages, both domestic and international, threaten to mire us in political conflict when we need to be working collectively to address this major challenge. This talk uses culture as context to identify limits of current climate policy initiatives and to sketch out viable policy options that may be more palatable to individuals on different sides of the climate divide. Dr. Kreitmair joined the Department of Political Science as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2016. Her research interests lie with environmental policy. In particular, she researches how we might overcome collective action problems underlying (large scale) social dilemmas as found surrounding many environmental issues. Kreitmair uses an inter-disciplinary approach (behavioral economic experiments, computational, and institutional analysis) to refine policy tools used in environmental management based on insights from the behavioral sciences. Kreitmair teaches classes in environmental and public policy and research methods.