The 2023 Iain McCalman Lecture

How can Australia successfully transition and adapt its interconnected social and technological systems as the climate crisis intensifies? Environmental law and governance expert, Dr Kate Owens, presents the 2023 Iain McCalman Lecture on how we can effectively harness climate governance to achieve deep coordination and sustained change.

The Iain McCalman Lecture celebrates Sydney Environment Institute co-founder and former co-director Iain McCalman’s dedication to fostering and pioneering multidisciplinary environmental research. The lectures aim to highlight the work of early to mid-career researchers working across disciplinary boundaries to impact both scholarship and public discourse.

This year, Dr Kate Owens will present the lecture entitled, Harnessing the transformative potential of climate governance: achieving deep coordination, change and equity.

The escalating climate crisis is a wicked governance problem: not only must we develop technologies capable of transforming our energy, land, infrastructure and industry sectors, but we must also implement those technologies at all levels of government and within complex, dynamic and interconnected socio-technical systems.

This will require a transformation “on a scale beyond anything we have experienced in our lifetimes”, according to the Australian Federal Government. But what forms of law and governance will we need within the next five years to enable this ‘whole-of-nation’ effort? How can we move from soundbites to actual implementation?