Rebecca's research, teaching and applied policy work focuses on social inequality, natural resource governance, emergency management and justice systems, particularly in Australia and the Pacific. Her scholarship is influenced by the fields of ‘law and development’, transnational feminisms, legal geography, political ecology and Pacific Studies.

Rebecca's published work includes some of the earliest empirical studies of climate displacement and relocation in the Pacific, and in 2021-2022 she led the drafting of Solomon Islands' first climate relocation guidelines. Her book 'Gender, Property and Politics in the Pacific' (2023) exposes the link between local level property disputes, wider processes of state formation, and gendered political participation. The book won the 2023 Australian Legal Research Award prize for a book. Rebecca currently holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award to examine the ways in which Pacific women’s movements mobilise around natural resource rights.

Rebecca regularly provides advice on customary and informal justice systems, resource governance, climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction and the rule of law to aid donors, government agencies, and international organisations working across Australian and the Pacific region. She frequently works in collaborative teams advising on projects undertaken by organisations such as The World Bank’s Justice for the Poor program, the Asian Development Bank, the International Development Law Organisation and the International Organisation for Migration.

Rebecca has previously been Deputy Associate Dean (Research) and Director Higher Degree Research. She is currently a member of the board of the ANU Pacific Institute, and the Australian Association for Pacific Studies.

Rebecca has worked part-time since 2014. Prior to joining the ANU, she was a researcher with the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre and RMIT’s Centre for Risk and Community Safety, and a solicitor in the emergency services team at Maddocks. Rebecca has also worked in the planning and environment groups of several major law firms, for an international NGO specialising in housing, land and property rights, and as a research assistant in the Van Vollenhoven Institute at Leiden University.