Dr John Cox is a Social Anthropologist and Development Studies specialist. John has more than twenty-five years' experience in Pacific Islands countries working as a volunteer, NGO program manager, development consultant, researcher and educator. His core work addresses social and political change in the Pacific and focuses on how class, gender and religious identity shapes developmental citizenship and nationalism.

His PhD (University of Melbourne, 2012) won the Australian Anthropological Society's Prize for Best PhD Thesis. John's doctoral research took mass Ponzi schemes as a vantage point from which to observe social and cultural change in Melanesia. This research was published in 2018 as a scholarly monograph with Indiana University Press, Fast Money Schemes: Hope and Deception in Papua New Guinea.

John researches contemporary challenges in Oceania, including new communications technologies, gender, livelihoods, and patronage politics. John has contributed to the Developmental Leadership Program's Gender and Politics in Practice research, and studies of locally-led development for the Pacific Leadership Program. Together with Social Work and Social Policy academics at La Trobe University, he researched gambling harms among Pacific migrants in Mildura.

John also works on the social dimensions of climate change in Oceania. He has collaborated with emerging scholars from Fiji on the political and religious implications of disasters and climate change, and evaluated Red Cross programs in Solomon Islands, Fiji and Kiribati. John was the Lead Research Consultant for the World Bank research project Building the Social Resilience of Communities in the Pacific to Climate Change (2023). With Dr Almah Tararia, he has also written a survey of climate change as a driver of conflict in PNG for the United States Institute for Peace.

Dr

John Cox

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