The climate economy: emerging strategies for Australia
Join a PhD project on Australia's climate economy, exploring how transport, policy, and finance adapt to climate change.
The scholarship is funded by a Discovery Project grant titled The climate economy: Emerging strategies for Australia to work with an interdisciplinary team based at Macquarie, Monash and Sydney Universities.
Key details
- 20247178
- PhD
- Applications close on 31 June 2025
- Domestic
- Arts and social sciences, business
- $38,500 per annum (full time, indexed)
The broader project with which the scholarship is associated explores Australia’s emerging climate economy, investigating how climate change challenges conventional economic policy paradigms and redefines political economic concepts and practices.
We aim to understand how the pressures of climate change are reshaping governance, investment and policy strategies in unexpected ways. Our innovative approach highlights the hybrid nature of this new political economic configuration, where:
- public and private actors are taking on new roles
- financial instruments are being reimagined
- economic outcomes must be measured in novel ways.
Focusing on three critical sectors – energy, transport and water – and three key processes – standardising climate information, underwriting climate income and providing climate capital – this research will map and evaluate Australia’s climate economy. By doing so, we aim to provide new frameworks for understanding and democratising the economic policies that will define a climate-changed future.
Macquarie’s node will focus on transport. Potential topics for this PhD scholarship include:
- exploring the recent success of financing strategies combining mass transport (metros) and transport orientated planning
- how novel public investment funds, such as the National Reconstruction Fund, advance supply chains needed for electric vehicle manufacture
- emerging alliances between unions, business, environmentalists and governments to rebuild manufacturing capacity.
The final topic is subject to negotiation and alternative proposals are welcomed.
Availability
This scholarship is available to eligible candidates to undertake a direct entry three-year PhD program.
Applicants require a research masters degree (or equivalent) in a relevant social science or economics discipline.
Components
The scholarship comprises:
- a tuition fee offset/scholarship
- a living allowance stipend.
The value of the stipend scholarship is $38,500 per annum (full time, indexed) for three years.
How to apply
For more information or to apply, email Associate Professor Ben Spies-Butcher at ben.spies-butcher@mq.edu.au.