Ian MacKenzie

Professor MacKenzie works in the fields of environmental economics, environmental policy design, and political economics. He joined the University of Queensland in September 2012, after more than five years at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He has published research articles on the economics of pollution markets, environmental auctions, and contests in outlets such as the Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Public Choice, Environmental and Resource Economics. His work has won the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Award for outstanding publication in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics. He is a Co-editor of Resource and Energy Economics and his current research focuses on environmental offsets, resource conflict, and the political economy of environmental regulation.

His passion is understanding how environmental markets operate. He has led numerous interdisciplinary teams in investigating environmental markets in collaboration with policymakers at the council, state, and federal level. His funding has been supported by the ARC (Discovery Project), Agrifutures, Rural Economies Centre of Excellence, Department of Environment and Science, Queensland Government, and the Australian Federal Government’s $5bn Future Drought Fund (Regional Drought Resilience Plan).

His teaching has connected students’ learned knowledge with real-world (and interdisciplinary) policy outcomes, with impact recognised by an Australian Awards for University Teaching (2021), UQ Citation (2020) and Commendation (2019) for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, BEL Excellence in Education Award, and 10 School of Economics Teaching Awards. He has been recognised because of his creative leadership in pedagogy: in the way he teaches and supports learning. He leads a transformation in how students engage in class and are inspired to learn by using novel learning techniques that include: storytelling and unusual contextualisation; adopting multiple strategies to expand students’ deep learning capabilities; and creating scenarios where learning is applied authentically. In doing so his students become critical and deep thinkers capable of transferring their knowledge beyond the classroom to help address society’s problems. He is the Director of Teaching and Learning within the School of Economics.

He was appointed to the Multisector Reference Group Committee, Queensland Government, (2021-) to advise the Queensland Government on revisions to the Biodiversity Offset Framework and has co-authored on the Australia Academy of Science response to the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) on the Independent Review of Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs). He often speaks at industry-government-academic events regarding environmental markets and has a strong media presence of his own research and expert advice on environmental markets.