People

My research interests lie broadly in understanding the factors that influence opportunities for collaborative management of common-pool natural resources (CPRs), and the multiple socioeconomic and environmental outcomes of such initiatives. I take an interdisciplinary approach to my research, and draw on theories and methods from a range of disciplines, including social psychology, behavioural economics, human geography and political science. I also collaborate widely with a range of natural and social scientists, policymakers and natural resource managers. To date, I’ve undertaken much of my research in the context of coral reef management in the Asia-Pacific region, including Indonesia, the Philippines and Fiji. I received my PhD from James Cook University in 2016 (for more details on my time as a graduate student please see this article), and am currently an Environmental Social Science Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Townsville, Australia.

My current research program has two broad themes:

Opportunities for collaborative management of common-pool resources

This theme of my research is concerned with understanding the factors affecting opportunities for collaborative management of common-pool resources, including examining why people engage in collective action in regards to CPR management and how such cooperative activities are affected by the micro and macro social-ecological context. Recently-published research in this theme includes examining how multi-scale socioeconomic and institutional factors affect participation in community-based management and cooperative behavioural disposition (as indexed by a public goods game). My current research includes examining the role of socioeconomic and cultural heterogeneity in influencing the likelihood of collaborative management, including in relation to cooperative behavioural types (i.e. conditional cooperator, free rider etc), and how environmental policy and management practice can account for that heterogeneity when engaging civil society in stewardship and public participation. In regards to the latter, I have recently completed a project that draws on place attachment theory to re-examine the notion of ‘community’ in environmental policy and management in the context of addressing contemporary sustainability challenges, which increasingly require transnational collaborative management and stewardship given globalisation.

Outcomes of collaborative management of common-pool resources

A core focus of my research in this theme is evaluating how people are impacted by and respond to community-based CPR management. Recent related projects have included evaluating the impacts of community-based CPR management on multidimensional poverty, including the equality of those impacts according to social subgroups, such as gender. Over the past two years I have been working with the Wildlife Conservation Society to develop a global social-ecological monitoring framework to be applied to coral reef sites; specifically, my role in the transdisciplinary process was to lead the development of the social indicators (more about this project can be found here). The framework has now been applied in more than 5 countries and we are currently examining the resulting data to understand the impact of management on various dimensions of human well-being, including distributional and procedural equity.

Supervision

Current

PhD

Jacqui Lau (2015-present, co-advising with J. Cinner and C. Hicks) Winners and losers in coral reefs: access, equity and ecosystem services

Marie Lapointe (2016-present, co-advising with G. Cumming) Trade-offs among ecosystem services in peri-urban and rural coastal communities

Past

MSc: Tracy MacKeracher (2017), Jeremy Horowitz (2016), Anushka Sandanam (2015)

Google Scholar Profile

Selected Publications

Gurney, G., Blythe, J., Adams, H., Adger, W.N., Curnock, M., Faulkner, L., James, T., Marshall, N. Accepted. Redefining community based on place attachment in a connected world. PNAS.

Pressey, R., Weeks, R., Gurney, G. 2017. From displacement activities to evidence-informed decisions in conservation. Biological Conservation 22:337.348.

Diedrich, A., Stoeckl, N., Gurney, G., Maipa, A., Pollnac, R. 2016. Social capital as a key determinant of perceived benefits of community-based marine protected areas. Conservation Biology DOI: 10.1111/cobi.12808.

Gurney, G., Cinner, J., Sartin, J., Ban, N., Pressey, R., Marshall, N., Prabuning, D. 2016. Participation in devolved commons management: Multiscale socioeconomic factors related to individuals’ participation in community-based management of marine protected areas in Indonesia. Environmental Science & Policy 61:212-220.

Gurney, G., Pressey, R., Cinner, J., Pollnac, R., Campbell, S. 2015. Integrated conservation and development: evaluating a community-based marine protected area project for equality of socioeconomic impacts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 370: 20140277.

Gurney, G., Pressey, R., Ban, N., Álvarez-Romero, J., Jupiter, S., Adams, V. 2015. Efficient and equitable design of marine protected areas in Fiji through inclusion of stakeholder-specific objectives in conservation planning. Conservation Biology 29:1378–1389.

Gurney, G., Cinner, J., Ban, N., Pressey, R., Pollnac, R., Campbell, S., Tasidjawa, S., Setiawan, F. 2014. Poverty and protected areas: an evaluation of a marine integrated conservation and development project in Indonesia. Global Environmental Change 26:98-107.

Gurney, G., Melbourne-Thomas, J., Geronimo, R., Aliño, P., Johnson, C. 2013. Modelling coral reef futures to inform management: can reducing local-scale stressors conserve reefs under climate change? PLOS ONE 8(11).

Aswani, S., Gurney, G., Mulville, S., Matera, J., Gurven, M. 2013. Insights from experimental economics on local cooperation in a small-scale fishery management system. Global Environmental Change 6:1402-1409.

Pietri, D., Gurney, G., Benitez-Vina, N., Kuklok, A., Maxwell, S., Whiting, L., Vina, M., Jenkins, L. 2013. Practical recommendations to help students bridge the research-implementation gap and promote conservation. Conservation Biology 27:958-967.

Melbourne-Thomas, J., Johnson, C., Aliño, P., Geronimo, R., Villanoy, C., Gurney, G. 2011. A multi-scale biophysical model to inform regional management of coral reefs in the western Philippines and South China Sea. Environmental Modelling & Software 26:66-82.

Gurney, G. 2010. Integrated models of natural and human systems: a critical component of environmental management. Pages 132-137 in Cleland, D., Melbourne-Thomas, J., King, M., Sheehan, G., editors. Building Capacity in Coral Reef Science: an Anthology of CRTR Scholars’ Research 2010. The Coral Reef Targeted Research (CRTR) Program, Global Environment Facility/University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.