Tiffany Morrison

James Cook University | JCU · ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

The Australian government must embrace UNESCO’s assessment to marshal the resources needed to protect the unique coral ecosystem. The Australian government must embrace UNESCO’s assessment to marshal the resources needed to protect the unique coral ecosystem. “Undercutting the listing undermines the purpose of the World Heritage Committee.” “Underc...

Political dynamics across scales are often overlooked in the design, implementation and evaluation of environmental governance. We provide new evidence to explain how interactions between international organizations and national governments shape environmental governance and outcomes for 238 World Heritage ecosystems, on the basis of a new interven...

The unprecedented global heatwave of 2014–2017 was a defining event for many ecosystems. Widespread degradation caused by coral bleaching, for example, highlighted the vulnerability of hundreds of millions of people dependent on reefs for their livelihoods, well-being, and food security. Scientists and policy makers are now reassessing long-held as...

An approach that tackles the underlying causes of coral-reef decline could be applied to other habitats, argue Tiffany H. Morrison, Terry P. Hughes and colleagues. An approach that tackles the underlying causes of coral-reef decline could be applied to other habitats, argue Tiffany H. Morrison, Terry P. Hughes and colleagues. Turtle swimming over b...

Significance Global sustainability depends on robust environmental governance regimes. An investigation of the Great Barrier Reef regime between 1975 and 2016 reveals how complex environmental regimes become increasingly structurally dense and eventually reach a point of stabilization. However, structural complexity and stability alone do not neces...

Nearly a billion people depend on tropical seascapes. The need to ensure sustainable use of these vital areas is recognised, as one of 17 policy commitments made by world leaders, in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 (‘Life below Water’) of the United Nations. SDG 14 seeks to secure marine sustainability by 2030. In a time of increasing social-...

Although ideas about preventive actions for pandemics have been advanced during the COVID-19 crisis, there has been little consideration for how they can be operationalised through governance structures within the context of the wildlife trade for human consumption. To date, pandemic governance has mostly focused on outbreak surveillance, containme...

Free access link until April 28, 2023: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1gjBLcZ3WyGWm Ecosystem restoration conventionally focuses on ecological targets. However, while ecological targets are crucial to mobilizing political, social, and financial capital, they do not encapsulate the need to: integrate social, economic, and ecological dimensions and...

Maintaining peace and conserving biodiversity hinge on an international system of cooperation codified in institutions, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brings recent progress to a crossroads. Against this backdrop, we address some implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the governance of biodiversity conservation both within and beyond Ru...

Success or failure of a polycentric system is a function of complex political and social processes, such as coordination between actors and venues to solve specialized policy problems. Yet there is currently no accepted method for isolating distinct processes of coordination, nor to understand how their variance affects polycentric governance perfo...

Diverse and inclusive marine research is paramount to addressing ocean sustainability challenges in the 21st century, as envisioned by the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. Despite increasing efforts to diversify ocean science, women continue to face barriers at various stages of their career, which inhibits their progression...

Standard solutions to the threat of >1.5 °C global average warming are not ambitious enough to prevent large-scale irreversible loss. Meaningful climate action requires interventions that are preventative, effective and systemic—interventions that are radical rather than conventional. New forms of radical intervention are already emerging, but they...

Research-engaged decision making and policy reform processes are critical to advancing resilience, adaptation, and transformation in social-ecological systems under stress. Here we propose a new conceptual framework to assess opportunities for research engagement in the policy process, building upon existing understandings of power dynamics and the...

Mangrove forests store high amounts of carbon, protect communities from storms, and support fisheries. Mangroves exist in complex social-ecological systems, hence identifying socioeconomic conditions associated with decreasing losses and increasing gains remains challenging albeit important. The impact of national governance and conservation polici...

Extreme climatic events trigger changes in ecosystems with potential negative impacts for people. These events may provide an opportunity for environmental managers and decision-makers to improve the governance of social-ecological systems, however there is conflicting evidence regarding whether these actors are indeed able to change governance aft...

ICSM CHC White Paper II: Impacts, vulnerability, and understanding risks of climate change for culture and heritage: Contribution of Impacts Group II to the International Co-Sponsored Meeting on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change. Discussion Paper. ICOMOS & ISCM CHC, Charenton-le-Pont, France & Paris, France https://openarchive.icomos.org/id/epri...

Interdisciplinary research is paramount to addressing ocean sustainability challenges in the 21st century. However, women leaders have been underrepresented in interdisciplinary marine research, and there is little guidance on how to achieve the conditions that will lead to an increased proportion of women scientists in positions of leadership. Her...

In the global transition to sustainable development, policy coherence is key. A new study highlights the equal importance of policy dynamism over time — how policymakers must anticipate national advances in sustainability to meet shifting strategic needs.

Policy actors address complex environmental problems by engaging in multiple and often interdependent policy issues. Policy issue interdependencies imply that efforts by actors to address separate policy issues can either reinforce (‘win–win’) or counteract (‘trade-off’) each other. Thus, if interdependent issues are managed in isolation instead of...

Global visions of environmental change consider gender equality to be a foundation of sustainable social-ecological systems. Similarly, social-ecological systems frameworks position gender equality as both a precursor to, and a product of, system sustainability. Yet, the degree to which gender equality is being advanced through social-ecological sy...

Climate change, unsustainable fishing, and land-based pollution (Ainsworth et al. 2016, Cinner et al. 2018, Hughes et al. 2018, Wenger et al. 2020) are among the top pressures to coral reefs globally, resulting in substantial losses of live coral cover (Eddy et al. 2021) and the loss of ecosystem services valued at more than $10 trillion dollars pe...

Institutional arrangements are key for problem-solving; therefore, pandemics require a strong governance response. While a plethora of ideas about prevention actions for pandemics have been advanced, there has been relatively limited consideration for how those can be operationalized through governance macro structures, particularly within the cont...

The term “climate emergency” represents a new phase in climate change framing that many hope will invigorate more climate action. Yet there has been relatively little discussion of how the new emergency framing might shape broader governance and policy. In this advanced review, we critically review and synthesize existing literature on crisis and e...

Decisions about climate change are inherently moral. They require making moral judgements about important values and the desired state of the present and future world. Hence there are potential benefits in explaining climate action by integrating well-established and emerging knowledge on the role of morality in decision-making. Insights from the s...

Marine capture fishery resources are declining, and demand for them is rising. These trends are suspected to incite conflict, but their effects have not been quantitatively examined. We applied a multi‐model ensemble approach to a global database of international fishery conflicts between 1974 and 2016 to test the supply‐induced scarcity hypothesis...

Gender equality is a mainstream principle of good environmental governance and sustainable development. Progress toward gender equality in the fisheries sector is critical for effective and equitable development outcomes in coastal countries. However, while commitments to gender equality have surged at global, regional and national levels, little i...

Sustainability in the Anthropocene requires social cooperation and learning against a backdrop of increasingly complex, polycentric governance. Here, we introduce an institutional navigation framework emphasizing how individuals pursue their policy goals within polycentric sustainability governance. We illustrate the utility of the framework by exp...

Recent studies suggest that the pervasive impacts on global fishery resources caused by stressors such as overfishing and climate change could dramatically increase the likelihood of fishery conflict. However, existing projections do not consider wider economic, social, or political trends when assessing the likelihood of, and influences on, future...

Parachute science is the practice whereby international scientists, typically from higher-income countries, conduct field studies in another country, typically of lower income, and then complete the research in their home country without any further effective communication and engagement with others from that nation. It creates dependency on extern...

The sudden and devastating crisis of the 2020 global pandemic put risk management front and center globally. Many analysts have already highlighted both the commonalities with, and interactions between, the COVID pandemic and climate change. They have also expressed the hope that what we learn about managing risks during the pandemic can help us ma...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Institutions are vital to the sustainability of social-ecological systems, balancing individual and group interests and coordinating responses to change. Ecological decline and social conflict in many places, however, indicate that our understanding and fostering of effective institutions for natural resource management is still lacking. We assess...

Social meta-norms, including human rights, gender equality, equity and environmental justice, are mainstream principles of good environmental governance. The permeation of social meta-norms through global environmental goals, policies and agreements (e.g., the Sustainable Development Goals) is now generally accepted to be critical to the integrity...

Elinor Ostrom and colleagues developed the social-ecological system framework with the aim of synthesizing knowledge to foster a better understanding of the relationship between people, institutions and the environment. Although the framework has facilitated the diagnosis of complex systems; it has thus far struggled to account for the role of hist...

Private and Indigenous protected areas are a growing component of the global protected area network. Countries can benefit from a diversity of protected area governance types as a means of creating complementarity and robust national reserve networks. However, strategically allocating resources among governance types requires a greater understandin...

Problems of scale abound in the governance of complex social-ecological systems. Conservation governance, for example, typically occurs at a single scale, but needs to inform governance and action at other scales to be truly effective at achieving social and ecological outcomes. This process is conventionally conceived as unidirectional – either sc...

1. The global environmental crisis (characterized by declines in biodiversity, transboundary pollution, habitat degradation, and climate change) has inspired international environmental regimes, such as the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), to establish large‐scale networks of marine protected areas (MPA...

This document contains the appendices to Sykora-Bodie & Morrison, 2019.

Vietnamese ‘blue boats’ – small wooden-hulled fishing boats – are now increasingly entering the territorial waters of Pacific Island countries and illegally catching high-value species found on remote coastal reefs. Crossing several international boundaries and traversing over 5,000 km of distance, these intrusions have alarmed Oceanic countries, i...

Failure to address unsustainable global change is often attributed to failures in conventional environmental governance. Polycentric environmental governance-the popular alternative-involves many centres of authority interacting coherently for a common governance goal. Yet, longitudinal analysis reveals many poly-centric systems are struggling to c...

Achieving effective, sustainable environmental governance requires a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the complex patterns of interdependencies connecting people and ecosystems within and across scales. Network approaches for conceptualizing and analysing these interdependencies offer one promising solution. Here, we present t...

The world's coral reefs are rapidly transforming, with decreasing coral cover and new species configurations. These new Anthropocene reefs pose a challenge for conservation; we can no longer rely on established management plans and actions designed to maintain the status quo when coral reef habitats, and the challenges they faced, were very differe...

Understanding the sets of co-existing institutional arrangements and the role of different actors for transboundary conservation is not only paramount for migratory species survival but also for studying the transformation of international politics. We analyze the global environmental governance architecture for conserving migratory shorebirds in t...

The notion of transformation is gaining traction in contemporary sustainability debates. New ways of theorising and supporting transformations are emerging and, so the argument goes, opening exciting spaces to (re)imagine and (re)structure radically different futures. Yet, questions remain about how the term is being translated from an academic con...

Multi-stakeholder governance arrangements involving co-operation between public and non-state actors are a vital part of the governance landscape for addressing social impacts resulting from resources development. Yet, the current mantra for ‘collaboration’ has gained relative credibility and legitimacy without scrutiny of the democratic characteri...

Raising funds is critical for conserving biodiversity and hence so too is scrutinizing emerging financial mechanisms that might help achieve this goal. In this context, anecdotal evidence indicates crowdfunding is being used to support a variety of activities needed for biodiversity conservation, yet its magnitude and allocation remain largely unkn...

Raising funds is critical for conserving biodiversity and hence so too is scrutinizing emerging financial mechanisms that might help achieve this goal. In this context, anecdotal evidence indicates crowdfunding is being used to support a variety of activities needed for biodiversity conservation, yet its magnitude and allocation remain largely unkn...

Governability is an important concept in the political and environmental social sciences with increasing application to social-ecological systems such as fisheries. Indeed, governability analyses of fisheries and related systems such as marine protected areas have generated innovative ways to implement sustainability ideals. Yet, despite progress m...

To minimize the impacts of climate change on human wellbeing, governments, development agencies, and civil society organizations have made substantial investments in improving people’s capacity to adapt to change. Yet to date, these investments have tended to focus on a very narrow understanding of adaptive capacity. Here, we propose an approach to...

Little is known about the drivers and governance strategies of appropriation of urban nature in the global south. We compare urban land-grabbing in the city of Colombo, Sri Lanka, with broader understanding of rural land-grabbing in the developing world. We show that the colonial legacy of appropriation and alteration of urban wetlands in Colombo h...

Conflict over marine fishery resources is a growing security concern. Experts expect that global changes in our climate, food systems and oceans may spark or exacerbate resource conflicts. An initial scan of 803 relevant papers and subsequent intensive review of 31 fisheries conflict studies, focused on subnational and international conflicts, sugg...

Social inequality in resource-dependent regions is a growing problem. Increasingly both state and private actors are acting as meta-governors to address the issue. In this paper, we focus on housing inequality as ‘the canary in the coalmine' for broader social inequality. While affordable housing has been the subject of growing attention in urban s...

Polycentric governance involves multiple actors at multiple scales beyond the state. The potential of polycentric governance for promoting both climate mitigation and adaptation is well established. Yet, dominant conceptualizations of polycentric governance pay scant attention to how power dynamics affect the structure and the outcomes of climate a...

Concerns about the sustainability of small-scale fisheries, and the equitable distribution of fisheries benefits, are wide-spread within government agencies, non-government organizations, and rural fishing communities throughout Pacific Island Countries and Territories. Addressing these concerns was given renewed impetus in recent years with the co...

The concept of spatial resilience has brought a new focus on the influence of multi-scale processes on the dynamics of ecosystems. Initial ideas about spatial resilience focused on coral reefs and emphasized escalating anthropogenic disturbances across the broader seascape. This perspective resonated with a new awareness of global drivers of change...

Coral reefs support immense biodiversity and provide important ecosystem services to many millions of people. Yet reefs are degrading rapidly in response to numerous anthropogenic drivers. In the coming centuries, reefs will run the gauntlet of climate change, and rising temperatures will transform them into new configurations, unlike anything obse...

Fisheries Guidelines — Pacific Island countries and territories are being called on to lead the process of national implementation and monitoring to improve socioeconomic and environmental conditions in coastal fisheries and fishing communities. To aid this effort, we compare these policies on three levels — visions, guiding principles and recommen...

Critics of ‘the governance turn’ suggest that, in self-governing networks and hybrid governance arrangements, there remains an imperative for coordination and steering of governance institutions and processes. This is termed ‘meta-governance’. The dominant view in the meta-governance literature rejects the claim that states have been hollowed-out a...

Pervasive environmental change, and the failure of top‐down technical solutions to respond to such change, has triggered a paradigm shift in environmental management. A social‐ecological systems approach, which recognizes the social and institutional dimensions shaping ecosystem processes and dynamics, has emerged. Within this paradigm, the concept...

In complex social-ecological systems, patterns of utilization of ecosystem services are a key factor that shapes both the society and the broader ecosystem. This paper investigates the links between urban environmental governance and fisheries in the urban wetlands of Kolkata (India) and Colombo (Sri Lanka). We argue that, despite the similar devel...

The cumulative effects of increasing human use of the ocean and coastal zone have contributed to a rapid decline in ocean and coastal resources. As a result, scientists are investigating how multiple, overlapping stressors accumulate in the environment and impact ecosystems. These investigations are the foundation for the development of new tools t...

Mainstreaming climate change adaptation (CCA) into plans and programs is still a new approach in adaptation and thus there is limited information on how to operationalize it on-ground. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the challenges in mainstreaming CCA into the local land use plans in the province of Albay, Philippines. Specifically,...

Social-ecological systems are often highly complex, making effective governance a considerable challenge. In large, heterogeneous systems, hierarchical institutional regimes may be efficient, but effective management outcomes are dependent on stakeholder support. This support is shaped by perceptions of legitimacy, which risks being undermined wher...