Whose Water Quality? Establishing a Baseline of Collective Identity and Experimental Messaging in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.

Whose Water Quality? Establishing a Baseline of Collective Identity and Experimental Messaging in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.

Project Team
Stephen Mainzer, Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture

Project Funding
SSRI Faculty Fellow

Project Description

Despite 35 years of organization and policy effort, water quality in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (CBW) has shown little improvement. While individual branches and sub-watershed basins have shown changes in key water quality indicators (ex: nitrogen, phosphorus, and turbidity) year-to-year, the overall water quality of the CBW has stayed the same or worsened. A place of immense ecological and economic importance to the United States, the CBW spans 44 million acres across 157 counties in 6 Mid-Atlantic states and DC and is home to 23 million people. Watersheds affect the life, well-being, and social interactions of people who live within their boundaries. To maintain their ecological health, watersheds require collective care and management at local and regional levels. Yet no efforts have examined the critical role of collective identity in framing knowledge, attitudes, and behavior changes. Collective identity, a sense of group belongingness and common purpose, is an essential precursor to the scale of actions necessary to improve watershed health at a regional level. Our goal is to leverage a novel transdisciplinary collaboration representative of socio-behavioral, communication, and ecological perspectives toward framing this problem through a collective identity lens. We aim to develop identity-based experimental messaging to test in a future watershed-wide survey.