Research Themes
RE&D researchers work in Australia, Asia and the Pacific on contemporary challenges in climate change, conservation, ecosystem services, land transformations, water governance, extractive industries, gender and development, disaster response and more. Our thematic strengths include:
Climate change: energy transitions, adaptation and mitigation
We work on the diverse ways that societies and governments respond to climate change. Our research employs social science methods such as those...
Environmental governance and regulation
Environmental governance refers to the local, national, and international processes involved in the management of the environment by key actors,...
Environmental economics
Environmental and natural resources are the foundation for all economic activities. Water, air, land, and their related ecosystems provide...
Food, agriculture, and rural development
Spikes in food prices and fears stirred up by a changing climate, growing energy and water needs and land grabbing, have heightened concerns...
Decolonial and Indigenous studies
Decolonial and Indigenous studies deals with questions of importance to Indigenous peoples in Australia, the Pacific, and across the globe....
Political ecology: Nature, power and state-society relations
The field of political ecology enables us to examine how power and knowledge influence the way that natural resources and the environment are used...
Gender, resource rights and environmental justice
Scholars in this group use feminist, critical, and postcolonial methods that are transdisciplinary and transformative to ask how social,...
Resource geographies and value chains
Resource geography examines how natural resources are ‘produced’ from nature, and the social, political, economic, territorial, discursive and...
