Community-based regional delivery of natural resource management

A very interesting report, especially given debate over the role of community networks in the new Federal Government priorities in Caring for Country...

Project Rationale

Policy makers in Australia have turned their attention (most significantly in the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality, NAP, and the Natural Heritage Trust, NHT) to making regional community-based natural resource management (NRM) organisations more accountable for the commitments they make on behalf of their constituents. However, existing knowledge in Australia of how we might build the requisite community-level capacities is sketchy at best. One strategy for building these capacities involves organising community-based NRM ­ from the ‘grassroots’ to the regional level ­ in the form of systems nested within one another. In this way, grassroots organisations can become voluntarily part of, and participate actively in decision making by, a larger system. Grassroots participation increases the legitimacy of decisions made at higher levels of community-based organisation, and thus the likelihood of local cooperation with those decisions -­ or at least that’s the theory. The problem for Australian policy makers is that nearly all the evidence of benefits from nested NRM is from research undertaken elsewhere. This project aims to obtain relevant Australian evidence through case studies of three NRM regions as defined for NAP and NHT: the South West Catchments Region (Western Australia), the Fitzroy Basin Region (Queensland), and the Mallee Region (Victoria). Lessons distilled from the case studies will assist policy communities at all (including community) levels to identify the potential of 'nesting' in their own contexts and how this potential might best be translated into practice.

Draft Project Report

A draft version of the final report, 'Community-based regional delivery of natural resource management: Building system-wide capacities to motivate voluntary farmer adoption of conservation practices', is available upon request from Graham Marshall. The draft is currently under consideration by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation.

See Institute for Rural Futures project page.

Executive summary of draft report is attached below.