Hunting for models: grounded and rational choice approaches to analyzing climate effects on subsistence hunting in an Arctic community

Climate change and uncertain economies challenge small Native communities of the North American Arctic, with their reliance on local fish and wildlife resources. Methodological boundaries of single-discipline analyses limit the contribution of academic research to the real-world questions facing Arctic residents. Oversimplified assumptions and lack of data hamper mainstream economic approaches based on rational choice, while more grounded approaches suffer from inability to generalize. We attempt to integrate these two approaches to project the effects of climate change on subsistence hunting in a Canadian Arctic community. In our collaboration, we find that rational choice modeling suggests specific questions that help direct the grounded research. Grounded methods provide general relationships and hypotheses as well as data for economic modeling. Using local knowledge (LK) obtained from grounded methods, we estimate a discrete-choice travel-cost model of subsistence hunting, projecting that climate warming may cost a typical household the equivalent of a half day of lost time during a hunting season. Besides providing data needed to make rational choice applications realistic, grounded methods reveal qualitative information essential for understanding relationships. We conclude that integration and synthesis of these disparate analytical approaches provides insights that neither method alone could have produced. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved