Stewart Lockie
Biographic Data
| ID | 280193 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stewart Lockie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stewart |
| FAMILY NAME | Lockie |
| SIGNATURE | LOCKIE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Central Queensland University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2109-6342 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 87 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 693 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 86 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Measuring the direct regional economic activity generated by marine interventions: Evidence from crown‐of‐thorns starfish control on the Great Barrier Reef
Marine interventions are expanding worldwide to address climate and other stressors on marine ecosystems. As these programs expand, their evaluation is no longer limited to ecological outcomes but also includes socio-economic contributions. These can be assessed by valuing ecosystem services or by quantifying the direct regional economic activity generated by program delivery. Complementing ecosystem service valuation studies, we adopt the latter…
From ‘green finance’ to ’woke finance’: Where should sociology stand in the critique of green finance and implications for a research agenda
Green finance, once heralded as a pragmatic tool for aligning capitalism with climate action, is now accused of being ‘woke’. While the social sciences have been strong on the critique of market-based environmental policy, we argue that the current political context calls for greater scholarly attention to how social and ecological change unfolds through the implementation of green financial instruments. Following a review of key literature on gr…
Reframing biodiversity markets for sustainable agriculture: A systematic review and governance framework for effective nature-positive outcomes
Biodiversity markets are gaining global attention as innovative mechanisms to mobilise private finance for conservation and support nature-positive transitions in sectors such as agriculture. Yet, empirical evidence on their design, effectiveness, and governance remains fragmented. This study presents a systematic review of biodiversity market literature, combining PRISMA-based screening of 671 peer-reviewed articles with bibliometric mapping and…
How do members of the public feel about novel ecosystem interventions? A longitudinal study of emotional responses to restoration and adaptation in the Great Barrier Reef
Climate-responsive ecosystem interventions are increasingly proposed to support coral reef futures, yet the emotional dimensions of public responses remain poorly understood. Drawing on three large-scale surveys of Australians conducted in 2018, 2022, and 2024 ( n = 8460), this study examines longitudinal shifts in emotional responses to six novel restoration and adaptation strategies in the Great Barrier Reef. Across all waves, positive emotions…
A social license to operate theory for lethal control of crown‐of‐thorns starfish on the Great Barrier Reef
Outbreaks of crown‐of‐thorns starfish (COTS) have been recorded on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) since 1962 and have considerable ecological and economic impact. Monitoring and control of COTS to predict, prevent and mitigate outbreaks is an important part of the ongoing protection of the GBR. We set out to develop an in‐depth understanding of GBR community perceptions of COTS management and to synthesize these perceptions inductively into a socia…
Possibilities for a critical social science of assisted ecosystem adaptation and other climate intervention practices
What is there to sustain? Ontological imaginaries and the existence and agency of gods, Tūpuna, and everything else
Sustainability science looks at who and what can continue to exist into the future. To do so, it must also grapple with ontological questions about what and who currently exists. Whereas people’s worlds are inhabited by vastly different entities and relationships, it is often only the entities that exist in dominant, science-based realities that are discussed in environmental research and policy. In such cases, a separation between objectivity an…
A call for strategic assessments of regional applications of solar radiation management: Exploring the challenges and opportunities from marine cloud brightening and albedo surface modification
Technological advancements offer the opportunity for interventions to reduce and potentially even counteract the impacts of climate change. However, advancements that can facilitate the adaptation of human and natural ecosystems to climate change, and possibly lessen the intensity and damaging impacts of extreme weather events, come with social, technical, and environmental challenges. These challenges are triggered by the complexity and uncertai…
Community Engagement for Novel Ecosystem Restoration and Assisted Adaptation Interventions: Observations and Lessons from the Australian Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program
Articulating futures: Community storylines and assisted ecosystem adaptation in the Great Barrier Reef
Public discourse about the Great Barrier Reef – a globally significant coral reef system stretching 2300 kilometres along the coast of northeast Australia – has become dominated by forecasts of its decline due to climate change. While a common and understandable response to fears about the Reef’s imminent loss is advocacy for stronger action on climate change, there have also been increased calls for a shift toward resilience-based management sup…
Sociologies of climate change are not enough. Putting the global biodiversity crisis on the sociological agenda
[Extract] In December 2022, the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted what was described in the official press release as a ‘historic package of measures deemed critical to addressing the dangerous loss of biodiversity and restoring natural ecosystems’ (CBD Citation2022). These included protection of at least 30% of the world’s lands, inland waters, coastal areas, and oceans by …
Mainstreaming climate change sociology
[Extract] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report on physical understanding of the climate system, released August 2021, concluded that human influence has unequivocally warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land (IPCC 2021). This came as no great surprise given the Fifth and Fourth Assessment reports released in 2014 and 2007 concluded exactly the same thing. Keep going back and the only discernable difference in …
Walking the talk on research and publication ethics
Exposing injustice and inequality is a raison d’etre for sociology. Environmental sociologists interrogate not only the social and economic causes of ecological crises but the violence perpetuated
Sociological responses to the bushfire and climate crises
[Extract] Only a few months ago, the Australian Government was accused of undermining negotiations over implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement. Today, the world’s media is reporting that Australia is on fire and the same government is facing an electoral backlash over its reluctance, among other things, to implement more ambitious climate policies. The obvious question is whether the bushfire crisis will offer a political circuit breaker e…
Climate Policy and Industry Elite Perceptions of Risk and Uncertainty: A Cross-National Study
There has been a growing focus on uncertainty as a distinct concept in the risk literature. This paper is concerned with how those involved in the design and implementation of climate change policy conceptualize risk and uncertainty. Based on interviews with policy and industry elites in Australia, China and the UK, it finds that participants did not distinguish between “risk” and “uncertainty” in their conceptualization of climate threats. For t…
Conflicting Temporalities of Social and Environmental Change
Privilege and responsibility in environmental justice research
[Extract] No other topic has appeared more frequently in Environmental Sociology over the last three years than that of environmental justice. Interestingly, this is not true of the field more broadly - something I will come back to later. My principal concern in this essay is to reflect on the positions of privilege that authors of environmental justice studies generally occupy with respect to the subjects of their research. The fact of research…
Sociology, risk and the environment: A material-semiotic approach
Sociology has made significant contributions to the conceptualisation of risk and critique of technical risk analysis. It has, however, unintentionally reinforced the division of labour between the natural/technical and social sciences in risk analysis. This paper argues that the problem with conceptualisations of risk is not a misplaced emphasis on calculation. Rather, it is that we have not adequately dealt with ontological distinctions implici…
A better Anthropocene
[Extract] Every now and then a concept comes along that shifts fundamentally, and in an enduring way, the ways in which we think and act. Rather more often, concepts come along that promise much but change little. Concepts that look set to capture the zeitgeist only to prove passing fads. Misdirections perhaps. Reinventions of the wheel. Unnecessary layers of semantic complication. So what is it with the Anthropocene? Useful neologism or gratuito…
The feminization of agriculture or the feminization of agrarian distress? Tracking the trajectory of women in agriculture in India
The rising share of farm work in India undertaken by women – a phenomenon commonly referred to as the feminization of agriculture – raises questions about the changing character of rural India, particularly with regards to women's social and economic roles. Based on an analysis of four sets of occupational data drawn from the Indian Census (1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011), this paper demonstrates that, as a process driven largely by the outmigration o…
Sustainability and the future of environmental sociology
[Extract] No single concept is mentioned by more articles published in Environmental Sociology than the concept of sustainability. This is not surprising. No other concept has done more to shape contemporary understanding of the social, economic and ecological interdependencies implicated in environmental change. Sustainability has become part of our collective common sense to a point that few contributing authors reflect critically on its meanin…
The emotional enterprise of environmental sociology
[Extract] A senior professor at my university recently announced, via social media, that on sharing research data with a group of colleagues he and everyone else present wept. Scientists don't usually cry over data and they certainly don't, as a matter of course, let others know when they do. In this case, the data in question came from an aerial survey of coral bleaching across the World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Unusually warm s…
Beyond resilience and systems theory: Reclaiming justice in sustainability discourse
[Extract] Poverty is not only an evil in itself, but sustainable development requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life. A world in which poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes. (WCED 1987, 8) One of the standout features of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in early 2016 as part of its 203…
Post-truth politics and the social sciences
In late 2015, the majority of the world’s governments agreed to commenced implementation in 2016 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development1 and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.2 No one w
Neoliberalism by design
Roll-out neoliberalism and hybrid practices of regulation in Australian agri-environmental governance
Mining Developments and Social Impacts on Communities: Bowen Basin Case Studies
Mining activities in Australia tend to be cyclical, with boom and bust times impacting upon associated communities. However, little information exists to classify key impacts or to identify how they vary across mining service towns. In this paper, qualitative social impact assessment techniques have been used to independently assess post-development impacts of mining on six communities in the Bowen Basin in Queensland, following the boom in coal …
Responsibility and agency within alternative food networks: Assembling the “citizen consumer”
The role of Landcare group networks in rural Australia: Exploring the contribution of social capital
Post-truth politics and the social sciences
In late 2015, the majority of the world’s governments agreed to commenced implementation in 2016 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development1 and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.2 No one w
Eating 'Green: Motivations behind organic food consumption in Australia
Central to the development of green lifestyles is the consumption of foods that by dint of their status as chemical-free, locally produced and/or free of genetically modified ingredients, reduce the environmental impact of food provision. Yet there are many other factors, such as health concerns, that may also encourage the consumption of 'green' foods. This paper explores the ways in which Australian consumers construct organic food - a sector o…
Re-discovering the social: Neo-liberalism and hybrid practices of governing in rural natural resource management
The feminization of agriculture or the feminization of agrarian distress? Tracking the trajectory of women in agriculture in India
The rising share of farm work in India undertaken by women – a phenomenon commonly referred to as the feminization of agriculture – raises questions about the changing character of rural India, particularly with regards to women's social and economic roles. Based on an analysis of four sets of occupational data drawn from the Indian Census (1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011), this paper demonstrates that, as a process driven largely by the outmigration o…
The Invisible Mouth: Mobilizing 'the Consumer' in Food Production-Consumption Networks
The distanciation of production-consumption relationships in space and time, and the historically productivist bias of social theory, have contributed to the development of sociologies of food production and consumption as largely unrelated academic discourses. Production-based agri-food studies have tended to treat consumption as either a domain of social practice distinct from, but determined by, production, or as a source of 'demands' that pro…
Market instruments, ecosystem services, and property rights: Assumptions and conditions for sustained social and ecological benefits
The 'Conventionalisation' Thesis Reconsidered: Structural and Ideological Transformation of Australian Organic Agriculture
In contrast with the uncritical optimism of popular narratives on organic food and agriculture, social scientists have debated at length the potential for the organic food sector to ‘conventionalise’; that is, to transform from an oppositional social movement promoting fundamentally different agroecologies and social relationships into a highly regulated and capital intensive food industry differing little from its conventional counterparts. Ofte…
Beyond the Farm Gate: Production-Consumption Networks and Agri-Food Research
The term agri-food research has become a convenient shorthand term to describe anexpansion of sociological interest over the last 20 or so years in the relationships between agricultural production and: increasingly industrialized networks of food production, processing, distribution and retailing; the development of transnationalized modes of regulation and governance; environmental discourse, policy and social movements; and competing understan…
Collective Agency, Non-Human Causality and Environmental Social Movements: A Case Study of the Australian ‘Landcare Movement
This article explores the implications for social movement theory of recent work in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) that explicitly rejects dualisms between society and nature, structure and agency, and macro and micro-levels of analysis. In doing so it argues that SSK offers: (1) a theoretically useful definition of collective agency as an achievement of interaction; that is (2) sensitive to the influence of both humans and non-human…
Choosing organics: A path analysis of factors underlying the selection of organic food among Australian consumers
Coal mining and the resource community cycle: A longitudinal assessment of the social impacts of the Coppabella coal mine
Constructing “green” foods: Corporate capital, risk, and organic farming in Australia and New Zealand
Capturing the Sustainability Agenda: Organic Foods and Media Discourses on Food Scares, Environment, Genetic Engineering, and Health
What is environmental sociology
[Extract] Environmental sociologists have a long-held ambition to transform sociology – to outgrow our sub-disciplinary niche and redefine the mainstream. Many of us firmly believe that environmental sociology requires us to rethink the foundational principles of sociology and indeed the very concept of 'social sciences'. We believe such a rethinking is critical to the ongoing relevance of the social sciences in an era of global environmental cha…
Networks of Agri-Environmental Action: Temporality, Spatiality and Identity in Agricultural Environments
Engineering new networks between state agencies, farmers and other actors is central to contemporary agri-environmental policy. This article examines relationships between network membership, identity and changes in farming practice from the perspective of three different conceptualisations of social networks. These include social network analysis, the network society thesis and actor-network theory. Despite their common reliance on the metaphor …
Deliberation and Actor-Networks: The “Practical” Implications of Social Theory for the Assessment of Large Dams and Other Interventions
This article reviews the potential contribution of deliberative theory and actor-network theory to the practice of social impact assessment (SIA). With reference to a case study of the World Commission on Dams, it argues for an approach to SIA that goes beyond documenting social change and that (1) targets consensus building among those impacted by planned interventions as a basic starting point for social scientific investigation; (2) places gre…
Environmental governance and legitimation: State-community interactions and agricultural land degradation in Australia
Capitalism today is showing an environmentally friendly face. Weyerhaeuser is tree growing company not the old growth clearcutting company, which it used to be. Proctor and Gamble encloses an environmental leaflet (printed on non-recyclable paper) in packages of its disposable diapers. Corporate publicists point to the benefits that will accrue to horribly polluted Poland and East Germany once Western corporations install modern manufacturing pla…
Chemical Risk and the Self-Calculating Farmer: Diffuse Chemical Use in Australian Broadacre Farming Systems
Diffuse chemical use and pollution in agriculture create a number of risks, generating concern about food contamination, environmental degradation, health and safety and agricultural sustainability. While ecological inter-dependence ensures these risks have global implications, they do raise the interesting paradox that at the point of application farmers seem to constitute both cause and victim. However, while Australian broadacre farmers profes…
Mainstreaming climate change sociology
[Extract] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report on physical understanding of the climate system, released August 2021, concluded that human influence has unequivocally warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land (IPCC 2021). This came as no great surprise given the Fifth and Fourth Assessment reports released in 2014 and 2007 concluded exactly the same thing. Keep going back and the only discernable difference in …
Production Relations under GLOBALG.A.P: The Relative Influence of Standards and Retail Market Structure
Retailer‐led food standards are playing an increasingly important role in determining market access globally. These standards are generally interpreted as a mechanism by which retailers have increased their capacity to co‐ordinate and control upstream actors, including farmers and processors. Taking an actor‐oriented approach to determine the various ways in which a group of farmers respond to retailer‐led standards, this study presents empirical…
Sociology, risk and the environment: A material-semiotic approach
Sociology has made significant contributions to the conceptualisation of risk and critique of technical risk analysis. It has, however, unintentionally reinforced the division of labour between the natural/technical and social sciences in risk analysis. This paper argues that the problem with conceptualisations of risk is not a misplaced emphasis on calculation. Rather, it is that we have not adequately dealt with ontological distinctions implici…
Landcare - Before the Flood
Profit, Risk and Stability: Decision Making Criteria for Sustainable Cropping
For some time now there has been a growing trend in cropping areas towards the use of so-called 'alternative' crops. Nevertheless, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS 1989) has reported that the area of land under crop on the central and southern slopes of NSW sown to broadleaf varieties in 1988 was still quite low at only 6 percent. Agronomists from the NSW Department of Agriculture believed that an expansion in the area sown to broadleaf c…
Landcare in Victoria: Getting the job done
Additional informationNotes on contributorsStewart LockieStewart Lockie is a doctoral student with the Centre for Rural Social Research. He is currently undertaking research into sociological aspects of participation in community Landcare groups
Environmental information for total catchment management: Incorporating local knowledge
Total Catchment Management (TCM) has been implemented in New South Wales to provide a more integrated, participatory' approach to natural resource management. This change in direction poses significant challenges for obtaining and integrating environmental information. This paper examines the adequacy of environmental information in terms of both the participatory turn in government policy and the management imperatives of the integrated, catchme…
Landcare in the balance: Wherefore art thou 'Landcareman
The 1994 Australian Landcare Conference ‘ Landcare in the Balance ’
Additional informationNotes on contributorsStewart LockieStewart Lockie is a doctoral student with the Centre for Rural Social Research and is undertaking his PhD on sociocultural processes affecting rural environmental management, with a particular focus on Landcare.Frank VanclayDr Frank Vanclay is a rural and environmental sociologist with the Centre for Rural Social Research, with a particular interest in the social aspects of farmer environ m…
Landcare in the Balance: “Wherefore art thou ‘Landcareman’?”
Beyond a ‘good thing’: Political interests and the meaning of Landcare
[Extract] If any one question plagues those who seek to evaluate or comment on Landcare - not to mention those attempting to initiate Landcare groups or programs - it is the seemingly innocuous question of just what Landcare is. Even the most cursory perusal of documentation on Landcare will reveal at least two things; firstly, that the term 'Landcare' means many things to many people; and secondly, that the idea of Landcare is closely related to…
Australian Culture After Mabo
Landcare Changing Australia: The lie of the land’
[Extract] Readers of Rural Society may recall our review(s) of the last National Landcare Conference which was held in Hobart in September 1994 (Lockie and Vanclay, 1994; Lockie, 1994; Vanclay, 1994). We have become somewhat notorious in Landcare circles for these reviews. Because we did have such a strong view of the 1994 conference, we looked forward to the 1997 conference to see what it would reflect of Landcare, and to see whether the organis…
Is 'subsumption' still relevant: The question of control in Australian broadacre agriculture
[Extract] During the 1980s, rural sociological debate was dominated by discussion of the commoditisation of production relationships in agriculture. An important element underlying this debate was the idea that the control of on-farm production activities was moving away from farmers and towards off-farm agribusinesses. While family farms remained the dominant form of farm ownership, they were believed to be 'subsumed' by off-farm capital through…
Chemical Risk and the Self-Calculating Farmer: Diffuse Chemical Use in Australian Broadacre Farming Systems
Diffuse chemical use and pollution in agriculture create a number of risks, generating concern about food contamination, environmental degradation, health and safety and agricultural sustainability. While ecological inter-dependence ensures these risks have global implications, they do raise the interesting paradox that at the point of application farmers seem to constitute both cause and victim. However, while Australian broadacre farmers profes…
Landcare in Australia: Cultural Transformation in the Management of Rural Environments
[Extract] Few rural issues have attracted as much attention over the last decade or so as the continuing degradaion of agricultural lands and water. Droughts, floods, recessions, agri-politicians, and bank foreclosures have all dominated the Australian media at one time or another, but erosion, salinity, water quality, and tree decline have maintained an insidious presence. Indeed, the extent of land and water degradation in Australia makes it di…
Environmental and social risks, and the construction of “best-practice” in Australian agriculture
Books
Meaning and the Construction of Social Impacts: Water infrastructure development in Australia’s Gladstone/Calliope region
[Extract] Social impact assessment (SIA) has become an important means through which the social implications of major infrastructure and resource developments are incorporated into public decision making. Yet the most appropriate manner in which to go about SIA remains as contentious in many development contexts as the proposed developments themselves. As Howitt (1989: 154) observes, 'the impact assessment process itself is part of a process of s…
Healthy For You, Healthy For the Environment: Corporate capital, farming practice and the construction of ‘green’ foods
Additional informationNotes on contributorsGeoffrey LawrenceGeoffrey Lawrence is Foundation Professor of Sociology and Executive Director, Institute for Sustainable Regional Development, Central Queensland University.Kristen LyonsKristen Lyons is a Doctoral student in Sociology and a Member of the Centre for Social Science Research, Central Queensland University.Stewart LockieStewart Lockie is Lecturer in Sociology and Associate Director, Centre …
The State, Rural Environments, and Globalisation: Action at a Distance' via the Australian Landcare Program
Contrary to the suggestion that transnational capital has largely subsumed the agency of Australian governments and farmers in shaping rural environments, in this paper I argue that new, often indirect, forms of action have developed within the context of globalisation and neoliberalism. These may be described as forms of 'action at a distance', oriented towards shaping both the environment within which people make decisions and the ways in which…
Community Movements and Corporate Images: Landcare' in Australia1
Australia's National Landcare Program is popularly seen as a successful attempt to address rural land degradation in a cooperative and coordinated manner. Involving everyone from community Landcare groups to the corporate sector and government agencies, 'landcare' is seen to have become something bigger than the program that spawned it. In lieu of convincing evidence that Landcare has transformed agricultural practices in a demonstrably sustainab…
Constructing “green” foods: Corporate capital, risk, and organic farming in Australia and New Zealand
Environmental governance and legitimation: State-community interactions and agricultural land degradation in Australia
Capitalism today is showing an environmentally friendly face. Weyerhaeuser is tree growing company not the old growth clearcutting company, which it used to be. Proctor and Gamble encloses an environmental leaflet (printed on non-recyclable paper) in packages of its disposable diapers. Corporate publicists point to the benefits that will accrue to horribly polluted Poland and East Germany once Western corporations install modern manufacturing pla…
Beyond the Farm Gate: Production-Consumption Networks and Agri-Food Research
The term agri-food research has become a convenient shorthand term to describe anexpansion of sociological interest over the last 20 or so years in the relationships between agricultural production and: increasingly industrialized networks of food production, processing, distribution and retailing; the development of transnationalized modes of regulation and governance; environmental discourse, policy and social movements; and competing understan…
Books
[Extract] Sustainability Indicators sets out to address a fundamental contradication at the heart of much contemporary planning and project appraisal. While sustainability indicators (SIs) are used to ascribe exact measures to the state of resources, pressures on those resources and management responses, sustainability itself is an immeasurable concept; a 'moving shadow'. This is not to say that SIs cannot be useful, but that their development, a…
SIA in review: Setting the agenda for impact assessment in the 21st century
This article reviews the literature and practice of social impact assessment (SIA) to address some of the perennial questions faced by all fields of impact assessment. What scope is there to extend impact assessment beyond individual projects? How might the different branches fit together? What is the relationship between scientific assessments and public participation? It argues that the relative marginalization of SIA has limited the effectiven…
Jules Pretty, The Living Land: Agriculture, Food and Community Regeneration in Rural Europe
Political science (57 works) · Sociology (51 works) · Economics (41 works) · Social science (33 works) · Business (29 works) · Law (29 works) · Geography (28 works) · Law (25 works) · Organic Food and Agriculture (24 works) · Politics (22 works)