Survey research in environmental politics: why it is important and what the challenges are.

The author reflects on the status of public opinion research in the environmental politics field and how individuals assess cues of cooperative behavior from other actors before they decide to incur private costs for the production of an environmental public good. It mentions motivate social scientists outside the environmental policy field to use findings from environmental scholarship in their work. It also mentions understanding of environmental attitudes at specific national and subnational levels, and on how environmental concerns stack up against other policy issues.