Dr Gurney awarded 2019 Fulbright Fellowship

Environmental social scientist Dr Georgina Gurney was recently awarded a prestigious Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr Gurney is based at Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Studies at James Cook Univeristy. The fellowship will allow her to spend five months in the USA collaborating with leading researchers and practitioners in sustainability and environmental governance.

“Achieving global sustainability is one of the most pressing challenges of our time,” says Dr Gurney. “Addressing this challenge requires action on a number of fronts. But a key pathway involves strengthening the ability of co-management, and other forms of environmental governance, to deliver outcomes across the three pillars of sustainability: society, environment and economy.”

Dr Gurney’s project involves working with eminent commons scholar Professor Arun Agrawal at the University of Michigan. Together they seek to understand the institutional and contextual conditions that give rise to co-benefits and trade-offs among the multiple environmental, economic and social outcomes of co-management.

“We will be taking a comparative approach,” says Dr Gurney. “Examining the commonalities and differences in the conditions that lead to alternative sets of outcomes in coral reef fisheries and tropical forestry co-management across multiple countries.”

To facilitate the uptake of this knowledge, Dr Gurney plans to develop a decision-support tool to guide on-ground co-management for multiple outcomes. The tool will be developed in collaboration with the international non-profit the Wildlife Conservation Society and Professor Bill Clark of the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where Dr Gurney will also be spending time.

“Although trade-offs are inevitable, this project aims to develop a decision-support tool to help practitioners identify and dampen the conditions that give rise to the most severe trade-offs,” says Dr Gurney.

“In a nutshell, the research seeks to understand what co-management practices work, and where, to contribute to sustainability, and to foster the incorporation of this knowledge into on-ground co-management practice.”

Read more about Dr Gurney’s research here.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship foreign exchange scholarship program of the United States of America, aimed at increasing binational collaboration, cultural understanding, and the exchange of ideas.