Dr Marwan El Hassan

Dr Marwan El Hassan

Scientist, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES)

Marwan has a background in Agricultural Science, Animal Science and Agroforestry, and has done a PhD in Natural Resource Management at the ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society, focussing on sustainable management of the Australian rangeland goats. His research interests include applying systems thinking in the context of human ecology and resilience theories to address complex social ecological systems. Marwan uses frameworks based on systems methodologies and scenario modelling, as a way to see the big picture of the often wicked problems within social ecological systems, like those around rangelands goats, and work towards a shared understanding of their dynamics and behaviour. Marwan focusses on the importance of establishing platforms where dialogue and collaboration lead to a shared understanding of social ecological systems and a collaborative approach to identify leverage points in these systems and harness their dynamics and feedbacks in tackling their complexity.

In light of these interests, Marwan analysed the rangeland goats’ conundrum as a pest and resource and proposed solutions for future collaborative management of goats that require a paradigm shift by all stakeholders in the goat system, which could lead to both environmental sustainability and growth of Australia’s goat meat industry. He is currently preparing for the next phase of investigating ways to test these approaches and understand behavioural motivations that can get stakeholders in the system together on the proposed platform towards the shared goal of sustainability. He is also interested in expanding his understanding of the goat problem by applying other theories, particularly resilience, adaptive pathways and the Theory of Change. Ultimately, Marwan would like the opportunity to extend lessons learnt from understanding the goat social ecological system into other similarly complex introduced animals, particularly feral deer.

Marwan is also currently working in ABARES on a project investigating general surveillance in biosecurity as a system, using a framework adapted from Agricultural Innovation Systems and Systems Dynamics theories. In addition Marwan is part of the research team of SP 2 of the FMD Ready project on behalf of ABARES.