RegNet scholars awarded APIP grant

We are delighted to announce that Associate Professor Christian Downie, Dr Yandisa Ngqangashe and Dr Lee White have secured funding from the Asia-Pacific Innovation Program (APIP). Our RegNet scholars will be making impactful contributions in climate advocacy, Australian food marketing policies and energy insecurity in remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory.

Assessing climate advocacy capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region – Associate Professor Christian Downie
Countries around the world are seeking to implement ambitious climate and energy policies to decarbonise their economies to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. However, existing policies remain inadequate. This project will access climate advocacy capabilities of non­state actors in three key nations in the Asia-Pacific region, namely Australia, India, and Indonesia.

This project brings together two leading ANU scholars in the fields of organised interests, lobbying and climate policy from the College of Arts and Social Sciences and the College of Asia and the Pacific. Darren Halpin from The School of Politics and International Relations and Christian Downie from RegNet intend to use this project as a platform to develop a workstream around capacity building within the climate advocacy sector.

An interpretive policy analysis of Australian Food Marketing Policies - Dr Yandisa Ngqangashe
This project will make an important contribution to understanding policy implementation process of policies for restricting the marketing of unhealthy food and beverages. It will also provide a content evaluation of food marketing policies and address the challenges in the intersection of policy design and policy implementation process.

This project is an extension of Yandisa’s 2020 APIP in which the team identified diverse range of discursive frames that different food marketing regulatory actors used to align the design of policies with their interests through policy language. In this project, they will expand on that research by examining how different regulatory actors interpret this policy language in Australian food marketing policies and how these interpretations influence policy implementation process such as monitoring compliance and enforcement.

Assessing the lack of regulatory protection in Australia’s remote communities – Dr Lee White
This project will assess the extent and severity of lack of regulatory protections for Australia’s remote communities (including Indigenous communities) regarding disconnection from electricity services, compared to those protections received by other Australians. The project arose from Lee and her team’s ongoing work looking at energy insecurity in unregulated remote communities in the Northern Territory whereby disconnections were alarmingly common and protections limited.

This project which is in collaboration with ANU researchers from the College of Asia and the Pacific and the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR), has the potential to make disparities in regulatory protection more visible, which could act as a powerful driver for change. The research team comprising Lee White at RegNet, and Brad Riley and Lily O’Neill at CAEPR, is planning to work with organisations embedded in remote communities when sharing the results, to centre those who are most affected. This work is supported by Research Assistant Sally Wilson, Masters student at the Crawford School of Public Policy.