Geography: Do we advocate enough for the discipline and profession in terms of public policy?

We are close on two quarters through 2023! The time has gone remarkably quickly and felt slightly disjointed. Perhaps that is because of the pattern of austral academic rhythms—leave-taking over summer, grant writing, preparing for semester one, and Easter and school holiday breaks in April. Or perhaps it is simply because academic life is busy. Either way, work related to the journal continues apace and that includes both our publication and our collaborative webinar with the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG) and Wiley. So, before I introduce the May issue, I want to spend a little time reflecting on one of two webinars we hosted in the first part of the year. Entitled Flourish or Flounder: the possibilities for geography education and the future of the discipline, the webinar was led by Susan Caldis, co-hosted by the Australian Geography Teachers’ Association (AGTA), and will be accessible here.

In one discussion in the webinar, I put a question to participants about the extent to which academic and professional geographers should be advocating for the discipline in political and policy circles. The question was not intended to suggest that the IAG and AGTA were not already doing so. Both organisations’ councils have been attentive in their engagement with debates about the Australian curriculum and changes to geography, for example.

Nonetheless, it is always useful to pause and ask: Are we doing enough? Could we do more? What more is needed? How would that work be done and by whom? For me, answers to the first two questions are fairly straightforward: no and yes. Thereafter, it becomes more complex and the views offered here are mine alone—an editorial privilege and responsibility not taken lightly. I have stopped short of addressing the last question on the grounds that it is beyond the journal’s remit and best left to the IAG Council and membership.

I have, however, been forward enough to consider what more may be needed. So, for example, could we engage public policy experts to provide professional development to IAG members via webinar platforms? Should public policy experts be explicitly identified on the journal’s editorial board? Might it be useful to add policy insights to more of our articles where content invites that approach? Do we need more focused calls for papers on public policy scholarship in geography? Perhaps as part of their mandates, might our Institute’s study groups be asked to address public policy issues explicitly and consistently and share those with the journal? At annual IAG conferences, what would it take to have a funded lecture focused on international comparative work on geography and public policy, which might then be published in the journal following peer review?

Doubtless, there is already useful and interesting scholarship on this crucial subject area, possibly starting with David Harvey’s (1974) initiating paper asking, “what kind of geography for what kind of public policy”? At least one edited collection led by Adam Whitworth (2019) has pointed to various responses to that question as it pertains to social policy and scale, power relations, spatial analysis, and mapping. Likewise, in a special section editorial on the subject, Shaun Lin et al. (2022, p. 77) have also pointed to the “substantial established literature on the geography–public policy relationship and its actual and potential trajectories.” They have suggested that debates about geography and public policy need to be recontextualised and reshaped for contemporary conditions. And they have written that there is ongoing pressure on geographers to “steer the discipline through [a] … politics of relevance and engage public policy in terms which are critical, moral and efficacious” (p 77). In the same special, John Harrison (2022) has suggested that foundational undergraduate texts in geography lamentably lack any reference to policy. This lack exists despite the fact that many geography graduates become leading public, private, and non-government sector personnel and profoundly shape policy outcomes at many scales over the span of their careers.

That point is highlighted by work by Janet Banfield and her colleagues (2022), in which a key argument is that our teaching is essential preparation for graduates. Echoing others, they claim that pedagogy “surely is the discipline’s greatest claim to impact” (p. 163), but I think that assumption should be unsettled. Given the range and severity of challenges that we face collectively, and given geographers’ capacities to think in integrative and innovative ways, I would think that our greatest claims to impact must be what we do in relation to research-informed learning and teaching and in terms of research and its intrinsic worth. Translational work is crucial to such efforts and policy translations are key.

There remains, then, much potential in terms of our engagement with geography and public policy, and I would welcome readers’ views. But on to the substance of May’s offerings in the journal.

We begin with the second of our associate editor commentaries, in which Alex Lo writes about carbon offsetting and renewable energy in a way that strongly models the very points I make above. Here is an accessibly written and useful engagement with issues crucial for public policy and to which geographers have much to contribute in terms of international, national, and local scales of challenge and solution; ecosystem processes; finance and energy geographies; and the political geographies of renewable energy futures.

Thereafter, we present a special section on legal geographies that we hope will be featured in our May webinar as well. Led by Josephine Gillespie and Tayanah O’Donnell (2023), the special comprises five papers by leading scholars in legal geography. I will not steal their thunder by summarising the papers here, because that is done comprehensively in their own editorial. What I will point out, however, is that every paper in the collection makes specific and important inroads into pressing public policy challenges related to agricultural research (Bartel & Graham, 2023), bushfire management strategies (Lange & Gillespie, 2023), biodiversity loss (Carr, 2023), shale gas developments (Sherval, 2023), and environmental contamination (Legg & Prior, 2023).

Three other original papers follow the special. In “Associations between coastal proximity and children’s mental health in Australia,” Laura Oostenbach et al. (2022) have provided evidence that coastal proximity may ameliorate depression and anxiety among children in Australia and suggested new paths for more research. In “Increasing livelihood vulnerabilities to coastal erosion and wastewater intrusion: The political ecology of Thai aquaculture in peri-urban Bangkok,” Danny Marks et al. (2023) consider how small-scale aquaculture farmers are dealing with fractures in vertical and horizontal governance and unequal class relations. Finally, in “Waiting during disasters: Negotiating the spatio-temporalities of resilience and recovery,” Gemma Sou and Kirsten Howarth (2023) examine the spatio-temporal dimensions of disasters, shedding light on what it means to wait to recover—as individuals and communities with embodied geographies and in relation to the state’s capacities to control how fast or how slow recovery times might be shaped.

Again, all three papers point to the crucial role that geographers have in producing research that has profound public policy implications. They are completed by a timely and apposite work by David Mercer (2023) who, in an extended and compelling commentary on David Wilmoth’s book, The promise of the city, also points to the ways in which geographers and geography have shaped public policy across universities, governments, and international organisations. Bears thinking about … a lot more.