He trained to study the land.
But Stewart Lockie came to realise the best way he could protect the environment wasn’t to work solely with crops or soil or ecosystems – it was to work with people.
Distinguished Professor Stewart Lockie, who leads JCU’s The Cairns Institute, is one of Australia’s leading environmental sociologists – a field that doesn’t study the reef, river or rainforest in isolation but alongside the people, industries and policies that determine their fate.
A career spent rejecting binaries
Much of Lockie’s work in the 2020s was through the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program, which develops solutions to restore coral but also recognises they need to adapt to survive hotter water.
“I always knew that work would be criticised by people who believe ‘you can’t put all this focus on adaptation, because you’re distracting attention from mitigation and solving the underlying problem’,” he says.
“My attitude is always: you’ve got to do more than one thing at a time.
“We’ve got to mitigate, we’ve got to adapt. We can’t take the foot off the accelerator on either, and we have to avoid the negative trade-offs where one harms the other.”
It’s a philosophy that was shaped by Lockie’s formative years, which occurred against a background of environmental disputes, including the Franklin River blockade, and protests against opening up the Daintree.
“In politics and the media, there was a very polarised approach to anything to do with the environment,” Lockie says. “You were either for development or some sort of fortress conservation.”
In 1987, the UN released the Brundtland report. It didn’t present a stark choice between development and the environment, but rather introduced the concept of sustainable development and how it could work for people, places and ecosystems.
This type of thinking clicked with Lockie.
“I gravitate towards approaches that challenge simple binaries - in general, I find binaries just unhelpful.”
Lockie grew up in the 1970s and 80s on Sydney’s northern shore, near Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, in a pocket of working-class families the state government had settled beside the professional suburbs.
He spent his childhood largely outdoors, using the bush as a playground and a shortcut – from the age of four he was roaming across the ridgelines of the national park to get to school or mates’ places more quickly.
"We grew up in Sydney," Lockie says, "but we grew up in the bush."
From soil to sociology
Lockie’s interest in the land led to an agricultural degree. He spent his early career digging soil cores and drawing up farm plans. Lockie found it interesting, but decided that to drive real impact, he needed to go in a different direction.
"I felt ultimately working with people was the only way we were ever going to really address environmental issues," he says.
Despite his unconventional path into sociology, Lockie found a willing supervisor at Charles Sturt University, completing his PhD in 1997.
A short-term contract at Central Queensland University turned into a 13-year stint, where Lockie moved up the ranks to become a full Professor.
It was there, in the coalfields of the Bowen Basin around the mining boom of the early 2000s, that he found the work that would define him: social impact assessment, but not the box-ticking kind.
"There's a lot of interesting stuff that happens that doesn't get reported in your standard, legislatively required impact assessments," Lockie says. He was drawn to research that could shift outcomes for whole communities by influencing government policy.
When The Australian National University (ANU) advertised for a professor of environmental sociology, Lockie was convinced to throw his hat in the ring. He got the gig, becoming head of the new School of Sociology.
“I did all the right things: doubled the student load, increased the research income enormously, and got the School up to equal performance with other schools in the social sciences, despite having smaller staff numbers.”
Not everyone would then walk away from a successful Head of School job at a prestigious university. So why did Lockie?
Research grounded in place
ANU was his first experience at a major metropolitan university. While Lockie says it was great in many ways, he ultimately found it a barrier to his research in environmental sociology.
“If your interests aren’t in, say, urban or political sociology, everything you do is fly-in, fly-out,” he says.
“No matter how hard you resist, you become a research tourist.”
In contrast, he had found environmental sociology at regional universities offered a greater depth in relationships with stakeholders from government workers to Indigenous leaders.
“I knew all the relevant people, not just for meetings but because we’d belong to the same clubs and see each other socially.”
Lockie moved to JCU to take the reins of The Cairns Institute in 2014. It was a move that offered Lockie a much better environment to do the work that drives him.
“Having embeddedness in a community gives you a much more solid basis to interpret the data you’re collecting, to know whether you’re asking the right questions. And it gives you a lot more scope to deliver outcomes and benefits – to keep working with people and not just hand them a report.”
From regional knowledge to practical change
Lockie describes The Cairns Institute as “a research and policy hub for northern Australia in the global tropics”, with research encompassing everything from climate adaptation through to water rights and the reform of human services in remote communities.
“We can look like we work on lots of different issues and people ask how it fits together cohesively – our part of the puzzle is getting those institutional and policy arrangements right for issues of critical importance for people in the region.”
These include working with Traditional Owners and policy experts to map a practical process for accessing water rights; and a capacity-building project with the University of Papua New Guinea on contemporary teaching practices that enabled its academics to transform how they took the curricula online during COVID.
Where national research takes root
Lockie is not finished challenging assumptions about where important research happens. He wants to see assisted-adaptation work extend beyond the reef into other ecosystems, and to make The Cairns Institute’s social policy research more visible nationally.
It is another version of the binaries Lockie has resisted throughout his career: that serious national research happens in metropolitan centres, while regional universities provide the field sites, communities and case studies; that you have to be for either conservation or development.
For Lockie, the most useful work has always happened in the space in between.