Teaching and Mentoring in Environmental Economics, with Jill Caviglia-Harris

Notable Quotes

• Study of equity tends to be absent from economics courses: “We did a systematic review of 92 course syllabi from courses taught across the United States, and we found that 75 percent of them included efficiency or markets as a course topic, 26 percent included environmental justice, and none included equity as a topic itself.” (6:03)
• Core values of a program to support young environmental economists: “In our core values, we have a mission to provide skills to young scholars. Our vision, more long term, is to change the culture in economics … We believe more voices in the room makes a better outcome in that we are, as a whole, a better field if we’re able to use all of those voices.” (18:12)
• Improving equity in the field of environmental economics is a long game: “The biggest barrier is pretty consistent across whatever realm you’re talking about: it’s culture and status quo. Any change is hard, so that’s why this program has been strategic. We first focused on small numbers, and now each cohort is going to fold in 20 new members to the group. That’s increasing the number of people who understand our priorities and the collective leadership and codevelopment methods of the program. These methods, in and of themselves, model how to recognize and affirm diverse voices by providing agency to our members and including them in the process of change.” (22:26)

Top of the Stack

• “The Six Dimensions of Collective Leadership That Advance Sustainability Objectives: Rethinking What It Means to Be an Academic Leader” by Jill Caviglia-Harris, Karen E. Hodges, Brian Helmuth, Elena M. Bennett, Kathleen Galvin, Margaret Krebs, Karen Lips, Meg Lowman, Lisa A. Schulte, and Edward A. G. Schuur
• “Looking at Environmental and Natural Resource Economics through the Lens of Racial Equity” by Amy Ando, Titus Awokuse, Jimena González Ramírez, Sumeet Gulati, Sarah Jacobson, Dale Manning, Samuel Stolper, and Matt Fleck
• “Systemic Racism in Environmental Economics” podcast episode from Resources Radio
• “Environmental and Natural Resource Economics and Systemic Racism” by Amy Ando, Titus Awokuse, Nathan W. Chan, Jimena González Ramírez, Sumeet Gulati, Matthew G. Interis, Sarah Jacobson, Dale T. Manning, and Samuel Stolper
• “Environmental and Natural Resource Economics and Systemic Racism” by Amy Ando, Titus O. Awokuse, Nathan W. Chan, Jimena González-Ramírez, Sumeet Gulati, Matthew G. Interis, Sarah Jacobson, Dale T. Manning, and Samuel Stolper
• Thinking like an Economist by Elizabeth Popp Berman

The Full Transcript

Margaret Walls: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Margaret Walls. Today, we are recording this episode from the Annual Conference of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, or AERE, as it's called. AERE is the main professional membership organization representing environmental and resource economists in the United States, and every year they have a big conference right around this time. Luckily for us here at Resources for the Future (RFF), it's right in our backyard in Washington, DC. AERE reached out to us and asked us to host the podcast here, so we're in our little meeting-room recording studio.

I want to take a minute to talk about the strong connections between AERE and RFF. AERE was founded in the mid-1970s when a group of economists that were working on environmental issues said, "We really need our own association, because this field is growing." At that point, it really was nascent. A lot of those folks had an RFF affiliation; some were at RFF, but most of them were affiliated in some way. Those were people like John Krutilla, Allen Kneese, Emery Castle, and Kerry Smith, among others.

I've also learned that RFF gave a grant to get AERE started and help to do the work necessary to establish the organization as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. For years, we had someone at RFF who managed the organization, a woman named Marilyn Voigt. We've had a lot of RFF people serve on the AERE board, including myself and a past RFF president, John Krutilla, who I believe was the first one. Current RFF Senior Fellows Alan Krupnick and Karen Palmer have also been presidents of AERE. There's a really tight bond. When the AERE board reached out and asked us if we would do the podcast here, we eagerly agreed.

Today, I'm really excited to have Jill Caviglia-Harris. Jill is a professor of economics in the Economics and Finance and Environmental Studies Departments at Salisbury University in Maryland. Jill's research is really interesting; it focuses on understanding trade-offs between development and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. She spent a lot of time in the Amazon doing her work. Her work is very community-focused, but we're not having Jill on to talk about that work today, unfortunately. That'll have to be a second podcast.

We're asking her to talk about some of the other important work that she does around mentoring and the development of AERE's mentoring program. We’re going to talk about that and about how to help build diversity, equity, and inclusion into both teaching and research in our profession.

Yesterday, Jill was on a panel at the conference that was entitled “Prioritizing Equity in Environmental Economics Research and Teaching.” I'm going to ask Jill to talk about that panel and what was discussed there. Stay with us.

Hello, Jill. Welcome to Resources Radio. It's really great to have you here in person. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

Margaret Walls: I have to ask you—we always do this—to start by telling us about yourself and how you came to be an environmental economist. What inspired you?

Jill Caviglia-Harris: The short answer is just one course, but my background is that I got my undergraduate degree at Binghamton University, and then I went on to the University of Tennessee, where I got my PhD. One of my very last courses at Binghamton was environmental economics. On the second day of the class, I knew I'd become an environmental economist.

Margaret Walls: That's interesting. What was it about the class? Do you remember? Just that you cared about those issues, or …

Jill Caviglia-Harris: I cared about the issues, and I was never exposed before to the fact that you can include a love of the outdoors and forests into something that you could study.

Margaret Walls: A lot of us have that a little bit, not everybody, but I think that's a strong bond that we all have.

Let me start this by asking you about the panel that I mentioned, “Prioritizing Equity in Environmental Economics Research and Teaching.” I went to that panel, and I really liked it. I thought everybody had some great things to say. It was much more substantive than I expected it to be. Our listeners weren't there, so tell us what that panel was about.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: Thanks for asking. I'd love to talk about it. The session, again, was titled “Prioritizing Equity in Environmental Economics Research and Teaching.” It included researchers who worked on community-engaged research and wrote papers on reducing or ending racism in environmental economics research. For me, it was grounded in a paper that I'm currently working on with six other environmental economists. The paper is titled “From Efficiency to Inclusion: The Present and Future of Undergraduate Teaching in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics,” and is being led by Sarah Jacobson at Williams College. It is about how we can address this challenge to change the way that we teach environmental economics. A common theme that I noted on the panel was that, in all these realms, we are all trying to figure out how to shift from the efficiency way of thinking that dominates economics to one that is more equity based.

Margaret Walls: You found, looking across coursework, syllabi, and so forth, that equity is given short shrift right now, right? There aren't a lot of curricula?

Jill Caviglia-Harris: It's not a part of a lot of curricula that we found. We did a systematic review of 92 course syllabi from courses taught across the United States, and we found that 75 percent of them included efficiency or markets as a course topic, 26 percent included environmental justice, and none included equity as a topic itself. Similarly, we also did a word count on these. We find that “efficiency” showed up an average of 2.3 times in each syllabi, while “justice” showed up about half the time (0.5 times), and equity showed up 0.4 times. There is definitely an emphasis—I don't think any economist would be surprised by the findings—on efficiency and a lack of focus on equity.

Margaret Walls: A lot of the discussion yesterday was about research. It is the same thing in research: in benefit-cost analysis, everything is more efficiency or allocated-efficiency focused and not really focused on who's bearing the burden of things, though there's more of that going on.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: I wouldn't say that that's necessarily a problem, except research has found that this focus on efficiency means that the policies we're creating are actually creating inefficiencies themselves. Our policies are part of the problem.

Margaret Walls: Yes, that's definitely true in the work I do, as well.

You mentioned some of the work you're doing on teaching and looking at equities in teaching. I know a little bit about some of the things you do at Salisbury, and I want our listeners to hear about this, because over the years, you've worked with a number of undergraduate students in economics, having them be research assistants for you, and you select students that might need a more guidance but are really promising in the field. Talk a little bit about that. Tell us about Salisbury University and the work that you've been doing over the years.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: Salisbury University is a state college in the Maryland system. We have about 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students, so it's relatively small. It's focused on small classes and individual attention with students. I don't see a large number of economics majors, and I can't say that I target any group of students or another, but rather, I try to create a warm and welcoming atmosphere in the classroom with really simple approaches, like including opening questions to begin lectures and providing affirmation when students ask questions. It's really as simple as that. By “opening questions,” what I mean is that these are questions I typically use to begin meetings. They're an integral part of the AERE Scholars Program, as well.

In this case, in lectures, I use them once a week—not in every lecture, and sometimes less than once a week. These questions quickly reveal something that's memorable. The guidelines for them are that they're positive, they don't exclude, and they provide information that's unique to the individual. For example, “What's your favorite alcoholic drink?” would not fit these criteria, because many would respond with beer or wine. We'd have a lot of repeats, and, of course, not everybody drinks, so we'd be excluding some.

On the other hand, “What's something that recently made you smile?” will result in an answer that's different for all. It won't exclude, and it would reveal something about the respondents. Other examples include: “What's something totally mundane you did over the weekend?” “What's something that helped you get through the week?” “What's a recent food memory?” I still remember some of the answers that students have given me to these questions, because they turn out to be pretty memorable.

Margaret Walls: That's interesting. Do you use some students as research assistants?

Jill Caviglia-Harris: Yes. I think that type of atmosphere in the classroom makes students more comfortable in approaching me. I've been lucky enough though to have funding for undergraduate students and undergraduate research through the work I do in Brazil. That allows me to hire students to work as my research assistants. I'm also able to bring them to Brazil with me when we have a field campaign going on. But it also means that I don't work with a lot of students. I usually target, at most, two in a year, but usually just one student per year. Again, I've worked with some amazing students as a result of just sending out a call and asking students to apply. They're always students that have been in my classroom and are comfortable in applying, because they feel comfortable approaching me.

Margaret Walls: I was on the AERE board when we decided to develop some new programs; one was a graduate student–engagement program, and the other was a junior scholar–mentoring program. You were instrumental in the design of the latter program, which is called the AERE Scholars Program. Tell us about how the program got started and how it works.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: The story of how it started is an interesting one. It goes back to some work in Brazil. My last field campaign was in 2019, and we worked with 45 undergraduate students in Brazil who administered the surveys. The first week of this campaign was big, and we were learning a lot.

After two days in the field, we had all the students come back to our headquarters. When they came back to the headquarters, we debriefed. When we were debriefing, we got information about the good roads and the bad roads; it was a process, but the headquarters happened to have a pool and some party facilities. So, after that, all the students—the students that were from Brazil and the students that were on our project—jumped in the pool and started playing volleyball. It became a party.

A colleague of mine and I—both principal investigators of the project—ended up in a corner of the pool talking about research, of course, because that's what we do. We talked about particular papers that we'd been working on and where we were targeting them.

The colleague that I was speaking to said that she wasn't comfortable targeting economics journals and that she would rather focus on interdisciplinary journals—journals in geography and other fields—because they were much more welcoming to women and minorities. She didn't feel like she wanted to advance anything that was happening in economics, because she didn't feel valued.

This is an economist that has a PhD from Cambridge, so I was floored by her answer. On the spot, I said, "Well, if you don't feel welcomed, we should do something about it and change it." It planted a seed in my head that we needed to figure out how to change things in economics. When this opportunity came up, the board asked me to put a mentoring program together for AERE because I was building on the career and mentoring program in the Northeast Association of Agricultural and Resource Economists. They asked me to build on that program. What was different with this one was that we embedded from the very beginning that we were going to use this program not only to mentor young scholars, but to change the culture in economics.

Margaret Walls: Tell us how it works.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: There's one-to-one matching of a mentor with a scholar, but there's more to it than that. What makes the program really different is that we have multiple ways of connecting with people. This one-to-one relationship serves as the core, but it's definitely not the pivotal part of the program. We don't like to put a lot of pressure on putting people together and saying, "You have to get along and work together." We give people tools for working together, and I honestly believe anybody can get along. With the right design, you can help those relationships blossom. I don't want to put too much pressure on this one relationship though, so we have “pods,” as well. The mentoring pods are the mentors that get together, usually about once a quarter, or four times a year, to discuss what's happening in the program and what's happening more broadly in their academic and other lives.

The same thing happens with the scholars, but they tend to meet more frequently. Usually, they meet about once a month. These pods are made up of four to five individuals who agree to meet together on Zoom and self-monitor what happens there. All the pods are different, and they figure out different ways of getting together and talking. I think the strength of it is that they’re self-determined; for example, we've had some pods that enjoy reading advice on how to be a good mentor and having readings before to guide the conversations, but we've had other pods that get together, and it's free-form; they talk about anything that comes to mind that day. Having that flexibility to work together and figure out how the pod's going to work has been a very successful part of the program.

Margaret Walls: Are there rules for the scholars themselves? Are they in the first one, two, three years of their career out of grad school?

Jill Caviglia-Harris: It's up to five years. We admit people less than six years post-PhD into the program.

Margaret Walls: I've heard from the scholar that I work with—and I know that she made a lot of connections with other people—that's a really big benefit. When they come to conferences like AERE, they have connections.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: Right, it makes these types of things much more comfortable.

Margaret Walls: It does.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: You have a group of people that have your back. If you walk into that room though, it's huge, and there's hundreds of economists, and you can hardly see through the crowd. It makes those types of engagements much more comfortable.

Margaret Walls: One of the things we often say is (you and I are more senior people), “We love AERE. AERE is friendly, and it's a great environment”—but it can be clubby. So, if you're new to the profession, you do kind of need those little anchors, I feel like.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: I think that's very important. All of us remember walking into those crowds and being intimidated and uncomfortable.

Margaret Walls: Definitely.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: Anything you can do to reduce that, makes the experience at the conference that much better.

Margaret Walls: You talked about the motivation from your colleague in Brazil, and I want to probe a little more on the diversity-and-inclusion aspect of the scholars program. I think that is a major goal that you've emphasized.

Can you talk about that a little bit more—about what you're thinking about with that? I think that you want to welcome researchers at all kinds of universities, but can you talk about that a little bit?

Jill Caviglia-Harris: In our core values, we have a mission to provide skills to young scholars. Our vision, more long term, is to change the culture in economics. We embed all of this in our core values; one of which is that we do not believe economists should be evaluated or valued according to their pedigree. That has to do with, maybe, diversity that you would define according to the type of university.

We have other core values that also speak to diversity in terms of gender and other identities. We believe more voices in the room makes a better outcome in that we are, as a whole, a better field if we're able to use all of those voices.

There is a process that we use for selection, and we follow the American Economic Association’s best practices, and those are guidelines for when we go through the applications that don't change. These are all determined before, and they change year to year. They can change and improve year to year, but once we have these guidelines set up, we don't change them. That is one of the best practices. In other words, you don't ad hoc go back and try to get somebody in the program that you think should be in the program that doesn't meet the criteria. We follow those steps, and one of the steps is—once we've determined the pool—to look at the diversity of the pool; that is an important part of the overall cohort that we select every year.

Margaret Walls: I believe it's now been in existence for four or five years; I'm not sure.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: Yes.

Margaret Walls: Tell me, what do you think? How's it going? Are you still super involved in it? What's the feedback been on it, and do you have any numbers about how many people have gone through?

Jill Caviglia-Harris: The feedback's been overwhelmingly positive. It's a change and a welcome change, and I would say it’s having a tremendous impact. We include 10 new scholars and 10 new mentors each year. Combining that with a very large first cohort that we took on during the COVID years when we didn't have the travel costs means that we now have over 100 people that have engaged with the program.

Margaret Walls: Those scholars will be mentors soon at some point.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: Not only will they be mentors, but they'll also be committee members, and we already have that. We have a rotating committee. All of our committee members are either old mentors or scholars. They'll also be committee members on other committees in AERE, and that's already happening. Yes, we expect that the old scholars will become mentors into the future.

Margaret Walls: Yeah, that's great. I should mention, because I was just talking to somebody about this—how successful you've been in fundraising for this program—and you took that on. I know you had help, but you took that on, and you got funding from the Sloan Foundation. Was there National Science Foundation funding, as well, or just the Sloan Foundation?

Jill Caviglia-Harris: It's been two years of funding with the Sloan Foundation, and we do have a grant in with the National Science Foundation, but we don't yet have an answer on that one.

Margaret Walls: It’s such great service to the profession, Jill.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: Thank you.

Margaret Walls: I want to ask what you've learned, across all your efforts, about the biggest barriers—going back a bit to this panel and also the mentoring program. What's been key to success? What are some of the bigger barriers to having more equitable and inclusive representation in environmental economics? This is a big question, I know, but what do you think success and progress looks like? Can you answer those big questions? Sorry.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: That's fine. I would say the biggest barrier is pretty consistent across whatever realm you're talking about: it's culture and status quo. Any change is hard, so that's why this program's been strategic. We first focused on small numbers, and now each cohort is going to fold in 20 new members to the group. That's increasing the number of people who understand our priorities and the collective leadership and codevelopment methods of the program. These methods, in and of themselves, model how to recognize and affirm diverse voices by providing agency to our members and including them in the process of change. Once we have a large enough number, we plan to chart a way forward together.

This won't be the AERE Scholars committee; this will be the larger AERE Scholars community who help us plan and chart a way forward to figure out how to scale our program and change economics more broadly. Success right now would be numbers of people that have gone through the program and support our mission and vision, and I think success of the program in the longer term is a changing culture.

Margaret Walls: Your work on teaching in the syllabi that you evaluated and so forth. Do you have thoughts about what needs to happen there or what sort of changes you'd like to be able to point to a few years from now? Not that you can take that on your own, but you are working on that topic …

Jill Caviglia-Harris: I'm thinking, "Wow, that's hard," because it means getting other people to change, too. For me personally, that would look like changing the way I teach economics by focusing on and comparing what happens when we center the efficiency of our models and the policies that we promote on improving environmental outcomes, to what the outcomes and policies would look like if we centered on equity. Right now, we don't yet know how to do that. We're tweaking models, we're giving thought to how to do it, but it's really hard. To have systematic change in that way, you need to have people on board. But I know what I can do in my classroom, and I think that's possible, but I do think we need new and better tools to do that.

Margaret Walls: We need more of the panel yesterday; more people like that, and reaching more people to educate us all.

Jill, this has been great. We like to close our podcast with our Top of the Stack feature. I'm going to ask you to recommend to our guests something that's caught your attention lately. It could be a book, an article, or a podcast—anything that you think you'd like to recommend. What's on the top of your stack?

Jill Caviglia-Harris: At the top of my stack is a book that I've started—haven't finished yet—called Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy, and it's by a sociologist. They are the best ones, I think, to evaluate that. They're not economists, so I think they've got this outside perspective on what we do. I think sociologists and social scientists in other fields are probably well-positioned to take a deep look at how and why we do the things we do. Her name is Elizabeth Popp Berman. So far, I've really liked it.

Margaret Walls: That's fascinating. I haven't heard about that book, so I'll have to give it a look.

Thank you. It's been really fun having you across the table from me here and having you on Resources Radio, Jill. I'm glad we made this happen. Thanks for taking time out of the conference schedule to come, and we're glad you were able to talk about building equity into teaching and research, and about your important work that you've done with the mentoring program. Thanks so much.

Jill Caviglia-Harris: Thank you for having me.

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