Professor Joshua Cinner
Fellow
- Bio/Profile
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Cinner is an ARC Laureate Professor.
His research focuses on using social science to improve coral reef management. His interest in this field began in 1996 while working as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in the Montego Bay Marine Park in Jamaica. There, he witnessed first hand how conventional conservation strategies were failing because they did not understand or reflect the social, economic, and cultural needs of resource users. Since then, he has worked with various coastal peoples in the Pacific Islands, South East Asia, East Africa, and the Caribbean to better understand how socioeconomic factors influence the ways in which people use, perceive, and govern coral reefs. His work draws together a wide range of social science disciplines (including human geography, common property, anthropology, and conservation policy) and he often works closely with ecologists on interdisciplinary research topics. Increasingly, his research is moving beyond the case study approach toward a ‘big picture’ comparative exploration of human-environment interactions.
He is currently working in three broad areas of research.
His first research thread examines the ways that socio-economic conditions such as access to markets and development influence the ways that people use natural resources. He and his colleagues use a ‘big-picture’ approach to integrating social and ecological data to explore these issues at a range of scales, including national, regional, and global. These results have been published in journals such as Nature, Conservation Biology, Current Biology, and Global Environmental Change, have gained major international coverage in venues such as The New York Times and CNN, and been the focal point of academic editorials. The current centrepiece of this program is his ‘Bright Spots’ project, which is the focus of his Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and his Pew Fellowship in marine conservation. The project seeks to identify and learn from places that have lots more fish than expected, given the socioeconomic and environmental conditions they are exposed to.
His second research theme, examines how different governance arrangements can benefit both people and marine ecosystems. The aim of this body of research is to examine how the key aspects of success (e.g. ecological, livelihood, and behavioural) are influenced by different institutional designs and socioeconomic factors (population, market influences, etc.). Integrating theories from geography, anthropology, and common property economics, he has sought to plug a large hole in our understanding of when and how marine conservation initiatives are effective by asking the question “what are the socioeconomic and institutional conditions under which they succeed or fail?” This project involves fieldwork in Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea and key results were published Global Environmental Change and PNAS (available free and open access).
His third research theme examines societal responses to environmental change. The aim of this body of work is to better understand how ecosystems and human communities will respond to climate change. The scale of this project is extremely large and includes socioeconomic and ecological fieldwork in >50 communities across Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Seychelles, and Mauritius. In this work, he and his research team examine how conservation priorities should differ based on site-specific levels of environmental susceptibility to climate change and differing levels of how human communities adapt and respond to this change (adaptive capacity). They are also exploring how poorer fishers are caught in a ‘poverty trap’ and pursue different response strategies than wealthier fishers. Results from this research theme have been published in Nature Climate Change, Global Environmental Change, Conservation Biology, Conservation Letters and in a book, Adapting to a Changing Environment: Confronting the Consequences of Climate Change published by Oxford University Press. Check out a review of it in PLoS Biology
