Associate Professor
Rowena Maguire

Biography

Dr Rowena Maguire is an Associate Professor within the School of Law at QUT.    She is the research theme leader of Systematic and Behavior Change platform within the Centre for a Waste Free World.  Rowena holds a visiting fellow position at Strathmore Law School, Nairobi, Kenya and was formally a  Research Affiliates at the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research.

Rowena's research is primarily concerned with equitable design and implementation of climate and environmental law with a focus on the land sector, specifically forest and agricultural regulation.  Since 2016, Rowena has focused her research on the implications of Gender Action Plans within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and she has produced some of the earliest legal feminist papers examining gender and climate change.

Her PhD research examined the international regulation of forest resources, published as a monograph: Global Forest Governance: Legal Concepts and Policy Trends (Edward Elgar, 2013).  Following on from this study, Rowena was appointed as a Research Affiliate to the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research and worked on a donor REDD+ project in Kenya.  From 2014- 2016, Rowena was a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery project examining international climate governance integrity issues.

Rowena is currently working as a Chief Investigator on a project funded by Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR)  focused on reducing emissions from the agricultural sectors in Fiji and Vietnam (2018- ongoing).  She is also currently a Chief Investigator on a project funded by the Cotton Development Research Corporation mapping labour risks across the Australian cotton supply chain (2019- 2022).

Rowena coordinates the units 'Environmental and Sustainability Law' in the undergraduate program within the School of Law and supervises higher degree research students working on projects in the areas of environmental law, gender and human rights.  She teaches the gender and politics component within the QUT Pathways to Politics, a program enhanced at increasing the number of women entering politics in Queensland.