Georgina Gurney

I am an environmental social scientist, and my research integrates geography, sociology and psychology to examine environmental governance, in particular, governance of conservation and sustainability initiatives in marine and coastal systems. The interdisciplinary approach I take to research often includes collaborations with biological scientists, and extends to a transdisciplinary approach, involving knowledge co-production with practitioners and policymakers from the environment and development sectors. Most of my research has focused on coral reef systems in the Asia-Pacific region (particularly in Australia, Indonesia, and Fiji). Some of my recent transdisciplinary research on coral reef conservation was profiled by Nature in an article on research related to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 Life Below Water.

I'm a Lecturer (Environmental Social Science) at the College of Arts, Education & Social Sciences, James Cook University. I previously held an Environmental Social Science Fellowship at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (2016-2022). In 2019, I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship supporting institutional visits at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. I commenced my Discovery Early Career Research (DECRA) Fellowship, awarded by the Australia Research Council, in 2021. This Fellowship focused on fairness in conservation and sustainability initiatives. I co-led the NCEAS Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP) Working Group on Coastal Outcomes (2019-2022). Our research focused on the role of diverse area-based management tools in conservation, particularly Other Effective Conservation Measures (OECMs). This project was implemented through a transdisciplinary research process, involving ~30 academics, practitioners and policymakers from the conservation, sustainability and development sectors.

I served as an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Conservation Biology’s (SCB) Social Science Working Group (2018-2021), on the SCB 2025 International Congress for Conservation Biology Organising Committee as the co-chair of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee, and on the Editorial Board of Sustainability Science and People and Nature. I co-founded and co-chaired the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Committee at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (2020-2023). I currently co-lead the Marine Social Science Network (Australia) and lead the Livelihoods, Equity and Governance research theme at the Centre for Sustainable Tropical Fisheries and Aquaculture, JCU. I am a member of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) Specialist Group on Governance, Equity and Rights.

My current research program has three broad themes:

The sociocultural and institutional drivers of collaborative governance of conservation and sustainability initiatives.

To deliver benefits to nature and people, conservation and sustainability initiatives tend to require collaborative governance approaches that involve and are led by stakeholders and rightsholders. However, key gaps remain in our understanding of the why people cooperate and form groups to engage in collective action for conservation and sustainability; this is especially true in the context of accelerating global environmental and social change. To help address this research need my collaborators and I examine the drivers affecting individual decisions to cooperate and the emergence of group collective action. Specifically, we elucidate sociocultural and institutional drivers operating at multiple levels, including the individual (e.g. attitudes, beliefs), group (e.g. group heterogeneity), and broader institutional (e.g. global conservation policy, institutional history) and social-ecological contextual (e.g. market access) levels. A key focus of this research theme is understanding the role of place attachment and identity in collaborative governance, including how place identity is related to participation in conservation. In one of our key papers, we drew on place attachment theory to re-examine the concept of ‘community’ in environmental policy in the context of addressing contemporary sustainability challenges, which increasing require transnational collaborative governance given globalisation (see related conference talk).

The social and ecological outcomes of conservation and sustainability initiatives.

Conservation and sustainability initiatives are social-ecological systems, with their outcomes and the drivers of those outcomes being both social and ecological. However, past research has tended to take a disciplinary approach, often focused on the ecological outcomes of area-based management and their biophysical drivers. To contribute to better understanding the outcomes of area-based conservation and resource management initiatives, my collaborators and I examine how area-based management (e.g. marine protected areas, including community-managed) affects people (e.g. with respect to multi-dimensional human wellbeing and poverty) and how ecological outcomes (e.g. coral assemblages, reef fish biomass and diversity) are related to multi-scale sociocultural and institutional drivers (e.g. markets, management rules).

An ongoing core component of my work in this theme is my transdisciplinary research on the multiple social and ecological outcomes of coral reef co-management. Drawing on theoretical and empirical literature on social-ecological systems, knowledge co-production, and common property, a key focus of this research has been developing a social-ecological systems monitoring framework for coral reef co-management through a transdisciplinary collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society. The framework was developed to be used by conservation and sustainability practitioners (see the social-ecological systems monitoring framework practitioners' manual) and has been applied in seven countries. We have used these data to explore the ecological effectiveness of diverse forms of management and the perceived benefits of fisheries co-management, including through a gender equality lens.

Justice in conservation and sustainability science, policy and practice.

Justice in conservation and sustainability research, policy, and practice is not only an ethical imperative, but also instrumental to addressing the socioeconomic and environmental dimensions of global sustainability challenges. However, understanding of what constitutes fair decision-making and outcomes in sustainability and conservation practice, and how they can be promoted remains nascent. Cross-cutting the previous two research themes, this expanding area of my work examines procedural, distributional and recognitional dimensions of justice, with a particular focus on fairness perceptions and their plural nature. My collaborators and I examine how these three key dimensions can be fostered in conservation and sustainability policy and practice, including with respect to the Convention on Biological Diversity 30x30 target and the role of Other Effective Conservation Measures (OECMs), a new global conservation policy tool. Our work on distributional equity has focused on conservation outcome equality and how it trade-offs of with biodiversity and fisheries objectives, as well as the perceived fairness of alternative outcome distributions and how perceptions relate to conservation support. Recently, we developed a framework for advancing procedural justice in conservation and sustainability practice.

To advance justice in conservation and sustainability science, my work involves research and advocacy related to how science is undertaken and by whom. For example, my collaborators and I have examined gender and geographic trends in authorship of coral reef science. I have been involved in several initiatives to promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) in research, including the JEDI Committee associated with the Society of Conservation Biology’s Social Science Working Group, as well as the ARC Centre for Coral Reef Studies JEDI Committee, which I co-founded and co-chaired until the end of the Centre in 2023. I served on the SCB 2025 International Congress for Conservation Biology Organising Committee as the co-chair of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee. In early 2023, I co-led a training workshop on advancing equity in small-scale fisheries management in the Pacific with The Pacific Community.