‘Sustainability Officers’ in Local Government  are relatively recent position and are working at the interface between governments and the community in a volatile, uncertain and highly politicised social field which is undergoing significant, rapid and highly contested change. Local government has been characterised as highly rigid and bureaucratic organisations, with research highlighting key challenges they face with climate change including: changes to governance structures, communication with stakeholders both within and outside the institutions, dealing with uncertainty and lack of specific local data on climate change. Reports from these survey and workshop-based research have alluded to the difficulties, and stresses, faced by environmental/sustainability officers working at these interfaces.

The research reported here uses longitudinal qualitative interviews with sustainability officers from both metropolitan and rural LGOs to examine 1) how sustainability officers work with the tensions between the social, political, environmental and scientific discourses and institutional  practices within these organisations; 2) identifies institutional barriers and enablers in the performance of their work; 3) how the ‘work identities’ of sustainability officers are developed and negotiated as relatively new and ambiguous positions within existing organisations and; 4) how their ‘work identity’ intersects with ‘personal identity’, in particular with their political and moral frameworks.