Research

Increasing awareness of the need to protect or manage the natural environment has given rise to increasingly complex institutional arrangements for environmental governance. There are global regimes like the Convention on Biological Diversity or the UN Framework on Climate Change, global epistemic communities and policy processes like the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change or the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a wide variety of government agencies and non-governmental organizations operating at different scales, a variety of policy networks or policy communities connecting organizations and individuals at different levels of political organization, and an equally wide variety of policy instruments ranging from international agreements through government regulations to market-based instruments and business or community initiatives. These institutional arrangements can be studied and evaluated by historians, economists, political scientists, and even anthropologists.

Current projects related to this theme

• Adaptation and economic responses to climate change
• Agricultural risks, typhoon events and livelihood constraints in Vietnam and the Philippines.
• Aiding Trade: Case Studies in Value Chain Development in Cambodia.
• Assessing Trade-Offs Between Conservation and Development Options for the Historic Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea
• Assessment of Coastal, Small Island and Coral Reef Ecosystems in Papua New Guinea
• Australia and international climate change mitigation commitments: applying game theory
• Breaking Down the Poverty-Environment Relationship in Papua New Guinea
• Climate Change, Fiscal Reform and Energy Security: Assessing Policy Options in Indonesia
• Conservation Forest Land Encroachment in Northern Thailand
• Crafting sustainability: addressing water pollution in Vietnam’s craft villages
• Decentralization of Coastal Zone Management in South and Southeast Sulawesi (Indonesia)
• Economic Incentives for Reducing the Contribution of Tropical Deforestation to Climate Change
• Environmental History of the British Empire and Commonwealth 1600-2000
• Ethnic Minority Women: Contested Identity in Transformation to Transitional Economy in the Upper Mekong Borderlands of Northern Lao, PDR.
• Investigating congruence amidst multiple and conflicting perspectives on what constitutes appropriate adaptation to climate change in Australia.
• Japanese and Australian Actions on Climate Change in the Pacific Island Countries
• Modeling Sustainable Use of Coral Reef Ecosystems
• Participatory Rural Water Resource Management for Socio-Economic Development in Bangladesh
• The Challenges of Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia (CHATSEA)
• The Contribution of Renewable Technologies to Energy Security in Fiji

Completed projects related to this theme

• Mechanisms for Reducing Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions under Uncertainty (2009)
• State, Community and Civil Society in Protected Forest Areas of Indonesia (2008)