The global crisis combines an unprecedented array of risks — including war, accelerated climate change, food and energy security, and pandemics — that threaten to disrupt societies and ecosystems. These global threats are embedded within epochal changes to the world’s economic and political landscape.
In response to a growing number of crises, we have been advancing policy solutions that are greener, more resilient, and more inclusive. We also have been investing in new technologies, such as biofuels and renewable energies, to address the challenge of a changing climate, and to advance policies that can help reduce financial vulnerabilities and support resilience against the impacts of disasters and other shocks.
While global events spawned by conflict, poverty, economic decline or extreme natural catastrophe do not afflict communities in uniform ways, they tend to be perceived as localized phenomena. This inevitably leads to causal attributions of blame that are based on the idea that global institutions – whether national or international – have both the obligation and capacity to manage local symptoms of the crisis.
Our research on this topic has two core aims: First, we examine how consumer perceptions of the severity of the local impact of a global crisis influence their trust in institutional efforts to manage its effects, and, ultimately, their adoption of behaviors that safeguard their well-being. Second, we leverage our expertise in marketing theory to analyze the role that consumers’ relational exchanges with crisis-regulating institutions play in their decisions and actions.
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