Edwina Fingleton-Smith

Edwina Fingleton-Smith is a Lecturer at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University, where she teaches across sustainability, environmental education, and urban systems. She holds a PhD in Sustainable Development from the ANU a Master of Environmental Law and Sustainable Development from SOAS, University of London and a Bachelor of Arts (Development Studies) also from the ANU.

Her doctoral research examined energy access in sub-Saharan Africa, using qualitative fieldwork conducted across 3 years in Kenya. The research looked to reassess our assumptions about the value of energy for improving development outcomes. Including issues such as the capacity of energy to improve productivity and economic development; the role of energy in improving women’s lives; and what theoretical models around energy use in developed countries can tell us about energy use by the 1 billion people who don’t have access to electricity and the 2.7 billion people who still cook over traditional fuels

Edwina's current and emerging research is focused on children's relationships with nature, and the systems, educational, regulatory, urban, and policy, that shape whether and how and which children can access it. Her immediate empirical work draws on qualitative methods to explore how educators across a range of Australian settings are responding to the sustained decline in children's independent access to natural environments, from dedicated bush schools operating outside mainstream regulation to primary schools embedding outdoor learning into their weekly programs. 

More broadly, she is developing a research agenda concerned with the full architecture of constraint and possibility around children's nature access: how urban planning decisions and the design of cities, neighbourhoods, and public spaces either enable or foreclose children's independent engagement with nature; how regulatory and policy frameworks can be reformed to better support nature-rich childhoods; and how children and young people themselves can be meaningfully included as participants in the planning and design decisions that shape their environments. Across this agenda, she is interested in both the practical barriers to change and the spaces, in policy, design, and educational practice, and where meaningful intervention is possible.