The public inquiry is a distinct and crucial part of policy-making in liberal democracies. However, its adequacy in Australia as an authoritative and effective ‘advisory mechanism’ on the promising benefits but sometimes controversial (socio-) environmental impacts of ‘big’ science and technology developments is a growing public policy problem, e.g., the environmental release of GMOs, wind farms, and nuclear waste dumps. The intended impact of my project is to strengthen the public inquiry through policy interventions embedded in new governance transitions slowly developing worldwide. The presentation will summarise the context and rationale for, and scope and significance of, the project, and the methods, which involve media, inquiry submission, and interview, analyses, policy learning, and policy seminars. Second, preliminary findings around the debate on nuclear power development in Australia will be presented, with the focal point being on the 2015 SA Royal Commission on the Nuclear Fuel Cycle. The Royal Commission found the key benefit in this area for Australia lay in low-medium level nuclear waste dumps, which converged to the position of the federal Liberal-National Coalition. This inquiry is a key case study of the project; the other is Victoria’s 2015 CSG inquiry.

Environmental changes present a challenge to the control of many infectious diseases. Cryptosporidiosis, is the most common cause of parasitic diarrhoea in humans reported from Australia and is spread primarily through water. We hypothesized that the spatial scale at which natural resources are managed would be more appropriate to explain spatio-temporal patterns of reported cryptosporidiosis, compared to the scale at which human health resources are allocated. We used the Integrated Laplace Nested Approximation approach to model spatio-temporal patterns of human cryptosporidiosis reported from 2001-2012 in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. Model fit and predictive capacity were assessed at each scale. Spatio-temporal patterns were better explained by natural resource management regions compared to the spatial scale at which health resources are allocated. Results demonstrated a high level of spatial heterogeneity in reported cryptosporidiosis, with an area of high risk in the southern part of the Basin. An increasing trend in recent years is seen in the north- west of the Basin. This exploratory analysis provides insights for future work on spatio-temporally dependent, environmentally-sensitive diseases, by informing the design of prevention strategies which should be based on spatial scales relevant for disease spread rather than at scales arbitrarily defined by humans.

Development Studies is positioned at a critical moment, but one replete with potential. For the current movement of refugees has brought to the fore two important challenges. First, it compels a much more rigorous engagement with a new geography of development. The boundaries of development discourse and practice are being reconfigured as formerly foundational distinctions and long-standing geographical demarcations between developed and underdeveloped societies, donors and beneficiaries, and rich and poor are becoming decentred. Instead, large-scale transnational movements, detention and resettlement of people fleeing violence and persecution, emphasises the need to shift from a focus on international to global challenges. Second, the so-called refugee ‘crisis’ has illuminated the need for development thinking to engage seriously with ideas around solidarity. This requires a more effective endeavour to forge practices of care for others based on mutual recognition and shared responsibility, rather than magnanimous gestures towards distant others. However, the persistence of dominant narratives that homogenise and dehumanise refugees reveal the inadequacy of development thinking to challenge these representations and to instil solidaristic principles. I examine how development might draw on distinctive skills and experiences in order to promote and sustain new forms of solidarity that work towards achieving global social justice.

Sierra Leone, like other Sub-Saharan African nations, has experienced recent major changes in its rural energy use. The rapid proliferation of energy-thirsty mobile phones; the mass arrival of inexpensive Chinese-made dry-cell battery lamps into rural markets; and experiments with new forms of biomass cooking have helped to craft new energy landscapes. These changes, however, have largely been ‘invisible’ to international energy agencies which still operate with a late-20th century understanding of energy poverty in Africa. For example, the 2014 Africa Energy Outlook report by the International Energy Agency uses ‘statistical data’ to characterise Africa’s energy poor households as lacking access to electricity, burning firewood for cooking needs, and using kerosene for lighting requirements; an energy poverty vignette that was (statistically) accurate for the typical African household between the 1960s and 1990s, but one that fails to capture contemporary dynamics. In this presentation, drawing upon empirical insights from Sierra Leone, we explore changing African energy geographies over the past 20 years. We examine how new energy technologies, energy-related skills and energy economies have surfaced among the energy poor as a response to political economy vicissitudes. As such, new energy geographies are emerging in Africa, reshaping energy poverty challenges.