Beginning

In the great tradition of programming, hello world!

My name is Carl, an environmental policy graduate student at the University of Arizona. I am starting this blog as an opportunity to maintain writing productivity and address questions in my many areas of interest. My intention is to post daily. The post will take the form of posing a question to myself and finding some answers, or at least some information on the subject to move me along in my understanding.

This process is modeled on a post I read last week on lifehacker about ways to be more productive through blogging. The idea is that if you write a bit everyday with some parallel focus then there will be an aggregate of value. In my graduate program there are disparate and dissonant assignments that might be forced into the box of my interest but they are rarely timed well and require meeting the expectations of a class or particular professor or discipline. Up to this point my free writing has consisted of notes on different books and articles as they pertain to different papers and presentations. Here I will be attempting to change this up. I will begin with a question and attempt to answer it.

The subjects tackled in my posed questions will most likely fall in the vein of institutional analysis in the context of community wildfire response (hence the name "Institutional Inquiry"). My work and interest in policy is situated in the work of Elinor Ostrom on solving common pool resource problems through local self-governance. My advisor, Edella Schlager, was one of her students and has continued developing work in this area especially in the area of water policy. I have collaborated with her on a number of projects and am moving into a period of building my own area of interest. This blog will be playing a major role in this self-guided process.

Rather than continue a long introductory post with more information about my interest I will rely on future posts to demonstrate them. Thanks for visiting!