Australian voters' attitudes to climate action and their social-political determinants.

Australia is a relative laggard on climate policy, amidst social and political fractures despite rising support for climate policy in opinion polls. In the 2019 Australian federal election, which was dubbed the 'climate election', the opposition campaigned on comparatively ambitious climate action but the government was returned on a status quo policy. We explore the social-political determinants of climate attitudes and how they are positioned in relation to voting behaviour, in the context of the 2019 election. We use a large nationally representative survey of Australian voters (n = 2,033), and employ univariate and multivariate ordinal logistic regression models to uncover correlates. We find that a large majority of voters think it is important for Australia to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, the importance given to emissions reductions is sharply divided along lines of political party preference. Holding pro-climate action attitudes consistently correlates with voting for progressive political parties and having higher levels of education. We also find a strong age cohort divide, with younger people holding stronger pro-climate attitudes than older people, raising the question whether we are seeing the emergence of a new generation expressing strong pro-climate action and progressive political attitudes that will persist over time. We conduct population ageing scenarios to project changes to public opinion, by age group, into the future. These indicate that strong support for climate action would increase by about four percentage points over the coming decade as younger voters replace the old, if attitudes within cohorts remained fixed. We conclude that while cleavages in climate attitudes in Australia are set to continue, efforts to promote climate delay are bound to have a limited shelf life as a growing majority of voters accepts the need for climate action.

Power, perspective, and privilege: The challenge of translating stakeholder theory from business management to environmental and natural resource management.

Stakeholder analysis and engagement is a central tenet for understanding and solving sustainability challenges, and is applied widely in environmental and natural resource management (ENRM). The practice in ENRM follows translation of stakeholder theory from its origins in business management to the sustainability sector. In this analytical essay we explore key concepts in ENRM research and practice to examine complexities that have accompanied this translation to ENRM. In particular, we consider the centrality of stakeholders' landscape perspectives in defining their stake in ENRM issues, and through this lens examine the limitations that are inherent in the classic 'hub-and-spoke' model of stakeholder analysis that is the theoretical underpinning for ENRM stakeholder analysis and engagement practice. We argue that unlike the traditional business context where both power and perspective are centred on the business entity that then defines other stakeholders in reference to itself, in ENRM, stakeholder relations are centred on an ENRM issue, typically a landscape or the implications of policy change on a landscape. As a consequence, decision-making power is decentred onto one of several stakeholders; often a government or other high power entity, implicitly conferring privilege to those powerful stakeholders' landscape perspectives over those held by low power stakeholders. We conclude with priorities for foregrounding power and explicating landscape perspectives to identify privilege in ENRM. We direct these insights especially to those ENRM actors who have the dual roles of adjudicator and privileged stakeholder such that they do not inadvertently perpetuate power imbalances through the privilege of aligning their decision-making power with their landscape perspectives.

Boundary spanning at the science-policy interface: the practitioners' perspectives.

Cultivating a more dynamic relationship between science and policy is essential for responding to complex social challenges such as sustainability. One approach to doing so is to "span the boundaries" between science and decision making and create a more comprehensive and inclusive knowledge exchange process. The exact definition and role of boundary spanning, however, can be nebulous. Indeed, boundary spanning often gets conflated and confused with other approaches to connecting science and policy, such as science communication, applied science, and advocacy, which can hinder progress in the field of boundary spanning. To help overcome this, in this perspective, we present the outcomes from a recent workshop of boundary-spanning practitioners gathered to (1) articulate a definition of what it means to work at this interface ("boundary spanning") and the types of activities it encompasses; (2) present a value proposition of these efforts to build better relationships between science and policy; and (3) identify opportunities to more effectively mainstream boundary-spanning activities. Drawing on our collective experiences, we suggest that boundary spanning has the potential to increase the efficiency by which useful research is produced, foster the capacity to absorb new evidence and perspectives into sustainability decision-making, enhance research relevance for societal challenges, and open new policy windows. We provide examples from our work that illustrate this potential. By offering these propositions for the value of boundary spanning, we hope to encourage a more robust discussion of how to achieve evidence-informed decision-making for sustainability.