Career Highlights:

-  Pacific negotiator on Loss and Damage United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC), Conference of the Parties negotiations (representing Vanuatu and Fiji) (2019-2024).

- Awarded an ARC DECRA: "Not drowning, fighting?: UN climate governance and Pacific Island countries" to conduct event ethnography of UN climate governance alongside a team of Pacific Islander researchers.

- Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery Project on Climate Change and Gender in the Pacific (2018- 2023);

- Appointed to the G8 Taskforce advising Australia's Chief Medical Officer on COVID meansures (2020);

- Lead negotiator for the Republic of Vanuatu on climate change and regional political issues (West Papua) Pacific Island Forum and international forums (2019-2021);

- Chief Investigator on the evaluation of a $8.25 million project looking at the use of family dispute resolution in the context of family violence in Indigenous and refugee families (2017-2020);

- Awarded the Australian Anthropology prize for the best thesis in Anthropology in Australia (2017);

- Awarded the Gender Institute prize for the thesis that most contributed to the advancement of gender studies (2017);

- Chief Investigator on a project for the Solomon Islands Government to develop a land reform pathway (2015);  

- Principal drafter of a new set of land laws in Vanuatu, as well as amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Vanuatu (2013-14);

- Legal/policy Advisor Central Land Council (2003-2008);

- Project Manager Reconciliation Australia (2001-2003);

- Research Officer Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (1999-2003).

Dr Siobhan McDonnell is an Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University. Siobhan is a lawyer and anthropologist who has over twenty-five years of experience working with Indigenous people in Australia and the Pacific. Since 2019 she has been a lead negotiator on climate change for various Pacific governments (on loss and damage, and mitigation). Her commitment to decolonial practice also means she has run land cases for Indigenous groups, and in 2014 supported the Vanuatu government by delivering land reforms to support better Indigenous land rights. 

Dr McDonnell’s commitment to the practice of engaged anthropology means that she produces research that contributes to high-impact policy and legal outcomes in the areas of: improved Indigenous land rights, improved natural resource management, consideration of climate change and resettlement issues, improved disaster management, innovative land reform in the space of legal pluralism and recognition of customary institutions, and legal outcomes that improve gender equity.