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Dr. Alison Leigh Browne
Academic Fellow at Curtin University of Technology, Alcoa Research Centre for Stronger Communities
Location:
Australia
Project Title: Mutated Colonialism and Neoliberalism in Australian Natural Resource Management: Sites of Exclusion and Emerging Spaces for New Alternatives
Publications and Presentations: Forthcoming
Project Description
Historical and current governance systems shape the way that indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians participate in land and water management.
Using her Alcoa Foundation fellowship, Dr. Alison Browne will analyze the various ways in which groups are included and excluded from natural resource management (NRM) in Australia. As a basis of this analysis, she will explore the mismatch between scientific approaches and engaged, participatory research approaches.
“By using examples of climate change and recycled water futures, I will explore the way that science tries to overcome uncertainties inherent in science, policy, and society,” said Dr. Browne. “This attempt to create certainty effectively underwrites the relationship between science and society, which participatory and engaged approaches attempt to establish.”
Dr. Browne also will explore the legal and political issues surrounding native title in Australia and the way that property rights construct boundaries for indigenous people in the management of land and waters in Australia.
“This discussion will be embedded in an overview of Australia’s colonial history and the historical exclusion of Indigenous Australian people from land and waters,” she said. “It will then move on to a discussion of the way mutated colonialism still shapes the exclusion and inclusion of indigenous people from governing their land in contemporary settings.”
According to Dr. Browne, the outputs from her research will provide a strong basis for changing approaches to environmental crises and natural resource management in Australia while also providing suggestions for improvement.
Biographical Information
Dr. Alison Browne earned her bachelor’s and honors degrees in psychology, a postgraduate diploma in indigenous Australian cultural studies, and a Ph.D. in community and environmental psychology from Curtin University of Technology.
Prior to her appointment as an Alcoa Foundation fellow, Dr. Browne was employed as a social and environmental psychologist at the Australian Research Centre for Water in Society at CSIRO Land and Water.
She has also worked on research projects through Curtin University and CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems in a variety of multidisciplinary natural resource management settings in urban and rural Australia. She has experience in teaching across a range of psychology and social science areas, including cross-cultural, environmental, and applied psychology and native title issues in natural resource management.
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