Governing Change Research Program

Human pressures are tipping marine ecosystems into new equilibrium states. Australia has the third largest marine estate in the world, and its marine ecosystems support critical industries and social and cultural values. The transition in our marine ecosystems requires similar transitions in governance.

This project aims to pioneer knowledge about the new governance arrangements required to manage changing marine ecosystems. It does this though a comparative study of novel interventions now underway globally, from which practical guidance on responsible marine governance will be elicited, with significant benefits to the sustainability of all marine ecosystems.

Australian Research Council - Discovery Project - 2022-2025

Investigators: Tiffany Morrison (JCU/UniMelb), Terry Hughes (JCU) and Gretta Pecl (UTAS), with Em Ogier (UTAS)

Climate impacts are creating novel marine ecosystems, stimulating new interventions to conserve oceans and communities. Novel interventions include blue economy, blue carbon, and blue conservation approaches that mitigate climate change (e.g. offshore renewable energy development, seaweed restoration, carbon trading) and promote conservation and adaptation (e.g. assisted marine animal and plant migration, marine climate refuge protection, solar-radiation control). Novel interventions require transitions in governance: to realise new opportunities, meet escalating demand for marine resources, and manage risks and unintended consequences. Achievement of these multiple outcomes is limited by a lack of understanding of which governance arrangements are enabling intervention win-wins for nature and people. This SNAPP group works directly with governments, NGOs, and donors to co-create practical guidance on how to govern new marine interventions in a changing climate.

Science for Nature and People Partnership - Working Group - 2022-2025

Investigators: Tiffany Morrison (JCU/UniMelb), Pip Cohen (JCU) and Gretta Pecl (UTAS), with Em Ogier (UTAS)

Global sustainability depends on better understanding and implementation of complex environmental governance regimes. However, current understanding is typically limited to snapshot analyses of the initial design or the emergent structure of complex regimes. To meet this challenge, we are focusing not only on the structure of regimes but also on systematically examining internal and external socio-political drivers in environmental governance.

Recent results have been published in journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and WIREs Climate Change, and cited in major policy reviews such as the 2017 Review of Governance of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Our main aim is to uncover hidden levers for improving the design, implementation and robustness of complex environmental governance regimes.

This program involves a diverse array of collaborators from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, University of Michigan, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, University of Exeter, University of Melbourne, Lancaster University, McGill University, WorldFish and WWF.

The problems of resource-dependent regions include globally uneven power relations and development patterns, and rapid and uncertain exogenous threats. At the same time, economic and social restructuring involving devolved planning responsibilities, privatised resource rights, and networked management approaches are undermining previous scientific and policy assumptions about the resilience of resource-dependent regions.

We already know that multiscale institutions play a critical role in ensuring the resilience and resourcefulness of regions in the face of such challenges. We do not yet understand why some regions are resilient while others strain or even paralyse under conditions of inequity, complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability. Our early contributions to this field emerge out of conducting empirical research on policy and administration in the USA and Australia, focusing on the role of scale in governance.

Our more recent work has involved the development of a Power in Polycentric Governance Framework for assessing different types of power in multiscale governance regimes. This has led to a new cross-national projects analyzing political dynamics across the governance of 238 World Heritage regions. By focusing on scale and power asymmetry, we are providing an important counterpoint to the ‘bottom-up bias’ in sustainability science. Read more about our work in Nature Sustainability and Nature.

This dimension of our research is concerned with the feasibility of different institutional designs to respond to chronic conflict and cumulative impacts of multiple environmental threats, such as global climate change, coastal development and over-fishing. In four recent influential Reviews (in Nature, WIRES Climate Change, One Earth and Nature Climate Change), we identified several key challenges associated with governing large scale SESs under climate change.

Future research will continue this work by developing a robust framework for understanding complex environmental governance under climate change, providing a more rigorous basis for understanding the effects of complexity and change on socio-ecological systems. New findings demonstrate that current governance regimes are struggling to sustain large scale SESs under climate change, highlighting the need for a more forward-looking understanding of the governance of socio-ecological change incorporating complex exogenous, cumulative and feedback dynamics.

See our new ARC Discovery and US SNAPP funded program on Governing Changing Oceans.