Kirsten Maclean

Six attributes of social resilience

The concept of resilience has attracted much attention in recent times. However, there remains a distinct knowledge gap with respect to the social aspects of resilience. This paper describes six attributes of social resilience identified through case study research. Research was undertaken by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers who worked in partnership with representatives from five key government and non-government agencies from the Wet Tropics region in North Queensland, Australia. Research findings move understanding of social resilience, which is an emerging area of interest within natural resource management, from a set of assumptions to an evidence base.

Consensus Building or Constructive Conflict? Aboriginal Discursive Strategies to Enhance Participation in Natural Resource Management in Australia and Canada

This article analyzes the strategies used by the Girringun Aboriginal Corporation from the Wet Tropics, Australia, and the Innu Nation of Labrador, Canada, in their efforts to participate in natural resource management within their traditional lands. Comparative research highlights that both Aboriginal groups engage in strategies of consensus building and constructive conflict, matching their choice to the dynamic institutional settings that govern natural resource management in their respective territories. Both groups build consensus for more equitable participation in natural resource management institutions while engaging, when necessary, in forms of constructive conflict that will bring about more expedient institutional change needed to fully reflect the full suite of Aboriginal interests and values. The result is a mix of Aboriginal strategies that are used to instigate planning reforms on their traditional estates.

Operationalising the ecosystem services approach in water planning: a case study of indigenous cultural values from the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia

Cultural ecosystem services (ES) are particularly challenging to value as well as to subsequently incorporate in scientific assessments and environmental management actions and programmes. In this paper, we apply a cultural ES typology to an Australian water resources case at a location of major indigenous cultural significance, the Brewarrina Aboriginal fish traps, and consider the potential implications for water planning. Data from qualitative interviews with indigenous custodians demonstrates diverse cultural values and associated benefits with respect to the fish traps themselves and to their connectivity with another key water site, an upstream lagoon. Supported by additional analyses of water planning legislation, flow requirements, and non-indigenous tourist values, we analyse the applicability of the typology and the implications for water planning. Key issues include: the distinction between values and benefits; whose values and which cultural ES benefits are identified and managed; the challenges of categorising indigenous aspirations within cultural ES frameworks; and the implications for water planning of indigenous perspectives on connectivity. Case studies of culturally specific minorities are useful for testing cultural ES frameworks because they posit conceptual and categorisation challenges. In addition, ‘culture’ is often of strategic and symbolic value for such minorities, representing the key means by which they gain access to, and traction within, natural resource planning and prioritisation processes.

From local to central: a network analysis of who manages plant pest and disease outbreaks across scales

One of the key determinants of success in managing natural resources is “institutional fit,” i.e., how well the suite of required actions collectively match the scale of the environmental problem. The effective management of pest and pathogen threats to plants is a natural resource problem of particular economic, social, and environmental importance. Responses to incursions are managed by a network of decision makers and managers acting at different spatial and temporal scales. We applied novel network theoretical methods to assess the propensity of growers, local industry, local state government, and state and national government head offices to foster either within- or across-scale coordination during the successful 2001 Australian response to the outbreak of the fungal pathogen black sigatoka (Mycosphaerella fijiensis). We also reconstructed the response network to proxy what that network would look like today under the Australian government’s revised response system. We illustrate a structural move in the plant biosecurity response system from one that was locally driven to the current top-down system, in which the national government leads coordination of a highly partitioned engagement process. For biological incursions that spread widely across regions, nationally rather than locally managed responses may improve coordination of diverse tasks. However, in dealing with such challenges of institutional fit, local engagement will always be critical in deploying flexible and adaptive local responses based on a national system. The methods we propose detect where and how network structures foster cross-scale interactions, which will contribute to stronger empirical studies of cross-scale environmental governance.

Politics of Knowledge

The aim of this chapter is to address the second question of this research and to enable an exploration of the tensions that exist at the nexus between environmental governance and environmental management. This chapter (and the next) considers the role of community stakeholder groups and their knowledge in the networks surrounding environmental management and community development. The findings of Chap. 7 demonstrate that project success is synonymous with community involvement. This analysis uses the conceptual framework for cultural hybridity to illuminate that project success of the environmental management and community development projects is dependent upon local community knowledge. This is because local community knowledge is powerful. As demonstrated in this chapter, it is powerful for three main reasons. It is powerful because it is tied to place, it is not just about place but can and does encompass the diverse knowledge cultures identified as necessary for western decision-making systems (identified by Brown, Environ Health 1:20–31, 2001), and it informs perceptions of other knowledge cultures. Therefore, local community knowledge determines whether or not individuals from the local community arena will engage in project work with individuals from other interest groups.

Performing a plant biosecurity emergency: The generation of disease absence and presence in Northern Australia banana plantations

This paper explores the generation of presences and absences of objects in plant biosecurity practices. We use praxiography to trace how multiple versions of disease were generated on a quarantined banana plantation during an emergency response to a suspected outbreak of feared Panama disease. Attending to the practices, techniques and materials that established different versions of disease presence and absence, we ask if the momentarily certain absence of disease on a particular farm necessarily indicated a favourable biosecurity outcome, thus informing enhanced policy strategies for plant health. There were, in fact, multiple objects. Not only diseases, but multiple presences of health, stress, disease and disorder were involved in confirming the absence of Panama.

Varieties of Local Knowledge

The first question of this research is to enable an exploration of the tensions that exist at the nexus between environmental governance and environmental management. This chapter also considers how knowledges of best practice environmental management move across and between international, national and local scales of environmental governance and community-based environmental management. As established in Chap. 6, knowledges of best practice environmental management move through local spaces of environmental governance and community-based environmental management. In this chapter, the conceptual framework for cultural hybridity illuminates that these local spaces are comprised of varieties of local knowledge.

Working Together to Better Manage the Country

The challenge of this book has been to engage with the metanarrative of ESD to consider theoretical and practical mechanisms to overcome the intra-generational inequalities inherent to this metanarrative, and resulting institutionalised practice. The aim of the book has been to consider ways to move beyond the dichotomies of exploitation inherent in this metanarrative. This chapter illuminates the theoretical and empirical significance of this research for contemporary research and practice in the field of environment and development. The following section presents the conclusions of the research: the role that the new conceptual framework for cultural hybridity has for theoretical debate and practical on-ground action. These conclusions synthesise the claims made by the new framework with empirical reflection for social action. Working towards cultural hybridity depends upon both theoretical tools and practical strategies. The theoretical tools provide the basis and impetus for social action. The practical strategies provide ideas for social action and represent the praxis between theory and action/practice. The chapter ends with a discussion that imagines the role and design of formal government institutions, on-ground projects and the individual or the self for social action to enable cultural hybridity.

Spaces of Environmental Governance

The aim of this chapter is to show how the first question of this research enables an exploration of the tensions that exist at the nexus between environmental governance and environmental management. This chapter (and the next) asks, how do knowledges of best practice environmental management move across and between international, national and local scales of environmental governance and community-based environmental management? The literature reviewed for this research, the applied peoples’ geography and the edge politics practised in this research suggest that knowledges of best practice environmental management move through local spaces of environmental governance and environmental management. This analysis uses the conceptual framework for cultural hybridity to demonstrate that a sophisticated awareness of how these individuals perceive environmental governance is integral to equitable and sustained environmental governance and management. This is because as the conceptual framework for cultural hybridity illuminates, environmental governance consists of place-based, relational, networked and entangled local spaces of environmental management. Environmental governance is connected to place.

An Environmental and Social Crisis

The aim of this chapter is to locate this research within the contemporary field of environment and development and thus provide the basis for why there is a need for a new conceptual framework for cultural hybridity. First, it traces a trajectory through contemporary development theory and considering the role that community participation and local knowledge can have in meeting the goals of sustainable development. Next, it considers how international environmental governance processes inform environmental governance policy and practice in any nation. Australia is used as a case study to provide focus to this critique. The chapter ends by highlighting why a new conceptual framework for cultural hybridity is necessary in this space.