Cultural evolution in adaptive management of grassroots activism in BC, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper demonstrates how implicit cultural evolution theory (CE) is used in adaptive management of grassroots campaigns of resistance against environmentally destructive industry and government to facilitate sustainable outcomes. For an action to be sustainable, it must be stable against political pressures. By bringing attention to the effects of social transmission-recruitment to a cause, learning across campaigns, and the transmission or cultivation of solidarity sentiments-cultural evolution presents a framework for tracking social dynamics essential for the sustainability of resistance projects. This is illustrated with examples from direct action grassroots activism in First Nations communities in northern British Columbia, Canada in the context of fights against unsustainable industrial projects. Specifically, grassroots activists work with an implicit CE theory of social transmission of values that posits that expansive, large-group organizing can get large numbers moderately committed to cause but that organizing focusing on small groups is more successful at transmitting intense commitment and adherence to First Nations norms. In the case of direct action resistance, such intense commitment is more vital than numbers for success. Further, grassroots activists have self-consciously developed institutions for the rapid transmission of policy innovations, accelerating the constructive evolution of tactics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".