“Incentives, if they are to work, must be meaningful within the overall context of consumer budgets and/or industrial capital plans, otherwise they are nothing more than just a give-away.”
Research in the area of community level sustainable development provides a series of challenges not always encountered in other areas of investigation. As ecological and social systems are interconnected, complex, and unpredictable, their study falls outside of the usual disciplinary structure. Research in this area also requires the participation of local knowledge experts as they understand the histories of the ecological and social systems under study.