For an overview, you can view my curriculum vitae.
In both time and space, flooding reaches far beyond inundated areas. Disasters affect people’s lives immediately and directly; they also spur debates and policy interventions with broad impacts. People in varied circumstances struggle to prepare for uncertain hazards and cope when disaster hits. Uneven social responses and environmental shifts result. My work examines how people and landscapes respond to the changes flooding unleashes and the implications for efforts to make a more healthy and equitable world.
In collaboration with the Hudson River Estuary Program of the New York State Department of Environmental Protection and other partners in state and local government, the cross-disciplinary team I lead is examining how households and communities respond to both changes in risk of flooding and the challenges presented by policy responses to flood risk. Exploring qualitatively how residents perceive flood risk, we found that flood risk generally has low salience, but many focus group participants have little trust in government flood management efforts, which in turn affects participants’ risk preparedness actions (Zinda et al. 2021). Analyses from a subsequent household survey show that predictors of concern about flood risk differ from predictors of concern about COVID-19 in ways that reflect the differing stakes and immediacy of these hazards (Zinda et al. 2022). We have also found that participation in community organizations enhances household flood preparedness in high-risk areas, while racial inequity brings divergent impacts: white residents take more low-cost protective measures, while nonwhite residents in high-risk areas take more high-cost actions (Zinda et al. 2023).
When we talk to people in flood-affected communities, their worries about the financial implications of flood insurance often overshadow concerns about flood risk. But National FLood Insurance Program (NFIP) policies and procedures are opaque, and research on flood insurance-related behavior often focuses narrowly on how people calculate risk. With funding from the United States Department of Agriculture and the New York State Water Resources Institute, we are opening up the black box around flood insurance purchase. To get a participant’s-eye view, we are conducting interviews with people in key organizational locations around these transactions: insurers, realtors, mortgage lenders, and local governments. We have fielded a survey of households in communities along the Hudson River to evaluate patterns of flood insurance purchase as well as awareness and attitudes toward flood insurance. We are grounding these inquiries in a statewide analysis of the socioeconomic correlates flood insurance take-up over the past decade. In related projects, we are examining affordability of insurance under the NFIP’s new pricing scheme to inform efforts at improving equity, and we are interviewing diverse homeowners to better understand the lived experience of obtaining insurance and filing claims. This work will help researchers and policymakers better understand the ways flood insurance decisions go beyond calculations of risk costs and benefits, providing a basis for making flood protection measures better promote the well-being of people in flood-affected places.
My work in China has examined how state authorities attempt to restore ecologies while pursuing economic development and political control, and what social and environmental changes result as people in rural communities respond. I work with an eye to how different situations within households, communities, and landscapes shape people’s options. I have collaborated with ecologists and other social scientists, using multiple methods to understand patterns of ecological change, variation across social groups, and people’s changing understandings of landscapes and social relationships. This work has helped us understand how a massive effort to enlarge forests by paying farmers to plant trees brought very different outcomes across different communities (Zinda and Zhang 2019, Zinda et al. 2017), how forest tenure reforms and efforts to promote walnuts as a cash crop produced unexpected results (Zinda and Zhang 2018a, Zinda and He 2020), how tourism in new national parks shapes conservation management and residents’ livelihoods (Zinda 2017, Zinda et al. 2014), and how gender and tenure institutions affect households’ choices about farming and migration (Zinda and Zhang 2018b, Zinda and Anshumali 2022).
This work is problem-driven, engaged, interdisciplinary, theoretically and methodologically broad. My inquiries start with practical concerns and from questions that emerge from close attention to data about human-environmental relationships. I work with scholars and practitioners across many fields to decide on research questions, plan data gathering, and interpret findings. This requires using varied methodologies; some issues require deep understanding of people’s experiences through in-depth interviews; some require comparing how things play out in different communities; some require examining broader patterns with data from surveys and existing datasets. Often we join data of different kinds to get a fuller picture.
Focusing on real-world situations often moves us beyond the frames existing social science theory presents. I have often found it helpful to explore tough questions by spurring conversations between different bodies of scholarship. For example, examining riverside residents’ responses to flood risk, I infuse a literature that centers on psychological explanations with sociological perspectives that center on cultural contexts of risk and social contexts of inequality. My work on reforestation has drawn on political ecology explanations that reveal how human domination shapes social-environmental relationships and human ecology research that highlights how varying human organization and economic activity shape patterns across landscapes. Putting the two in dialogue enables me to enrich political-ecological accounts of struggle and negotiation with a human-ecological attention to variation, showing how power relations and livelihoods join to bring different outcomes across communities and landscapes.
As climate change, shifts in built infrastructure, and population concentrations in floodplains converge, flood risk and its social outflows are intensifying. My work starts from the experiences of people involved in these situations and examines them in the contexts of the institutional and environmental dynamics that mediate social-environmental relationships.
John Zinda 