A workshop on transforming Australia’s resource and energy governance is happening at Flinders University in Adelaide this week, 26–27 September 2019.
The workshop brings together leading scholars nationally on environmental politics and policy to consider ways forward on resource and energy governance.
It addresses the unprecedented challenges to Australia’s systems of resource and energy governance. As environmental change intensifies, affecting multiple aspects of Australia’s economy and society, clear-sighted analysis of possibilities for transforming environmental governance is needed. However, prospects for transformation depend on addressing major political and policy barriers, including high degrees of party polarisation on climate change, and complex federal-state relationships on transboundary environmental systems such as the Murray-Darling Basin. These barriers in turn raise important questions for research, including what theories and methods are suited to explaining stasis and change in these areas, and what modes of governance are capable of bringing about democratically legitimate and just transformations.
The event brings together policy practitioners and Australia’s leading scholars of environmental, energy and resource policy in order to map out the historical and contemporary challenges and possibilities for governing sustainably. The workshop addresses the past, present and future of environmental governance:
- What are the origins of environmental, resource and energy policy failures and successes in Australia?
- What dynamics shape today’s governance regimes?
- How can existing modes of governance be transformed to grapple with the intensifying environmental change in Australia’s society-economy?
Workshop presenters and participants also include attendees from Lock the Gate, the Australia Institute and The Department of Environment and Water (SA).
The workshop is convened by Cassandra Star (Flinders University), Jonathan Pickering (University of Canberra) and Rebecca Pearse (University of Sydney), hosted by the Climate and Sustainability Policy Research Group (CASPR) and the Democratic Futures research theme at Flinders University.
This workshop is funded by the Australian Political Studies Association (APSA).
