Margaret Ayre

“Unwritten, unsaid, just known”: the role of Indigenous knowledge(s) in water planning in Australia

Water planning processes in Australia have struggled to account for Indigenous interests and rights in water, including the use of Indigenous knowledge in water management. In exploring the role of Indigenous knowledge in government-led water planning processes, how might tensions between Western scientific and Indigenous knowledges be lessened? Drawing on two case studies from northern Australia we examine how Indigenous knowledge is represented and managed as a different social knowledge to that of Western science in a management context where legal and planning conventions assume priority. The role of Indigenous (social) knowledges in developing options and strategies for sustainable water management is contingent upon the participation of Indigenous people in water planning. We suggest that water planning processes must contain the possibility of an explicit approach to mutual recognition and consequent translation of the conceptual and pragmatic bases of water management and planning in both Western scientific and Indigenous domains.

Community sustainability and agricultural landscape change: insights into the durability and vulnerability of the productivist regime

Abstract Food is produced in material places: distinct combinations of landform, soil, climate, hydrology and biota. However, agricultural landscapes are more than material, they are also social. Biophysical materials interact with phenomena including communities of place, and the wider economic, political and social context, to produce particular practices and arrangements of food production. The sociologically informed concept of place-making has recently been introduced to sustainability science, with the suggestion that it can assist in identifying practical pathways towards more sustainable landscapes, through offering insight into this variety of relations between the physical and the social. Here, we apply this perspective to a case study of an Australian rural community of place that is grappling with questions surrounding the future of its farm land. We have used “community sustainability” as a conceptual entry point for exploring how landscape development trajectories result from discursive place-frames that draw on different sets of place-making relations. In this case, the relations that reproduce a broadly “productivist” trajectory in landscape change are strong, but under some pressure, most evident in community perceptions of the relative unattractiveness of traditional farming livelihoods to a younger generation. However, place-making relations that might lead in alternative directions are weak. Incremental change towards a more diverse agricultural landscape appears possible if different economic and discursive relations can be drawn on to create a different place-frame that offers an equivalent promise for maintaining community in place.

Learning from collaborative research on sustainably managing fresh water: implications for ethical research–practice engagement

Since the mid-2000s, there has been increasing recognition of the promise of collaborative research and management for addressing complex issues in sustainably managing fresh water. A large variety of collaborative freshwater research and management processes is now evident around the world. However, how collective knowledge development, coproduction, or cocreation is carried out in an ethical manner is less well known. From the literature and our experiences as applied, transdisciplinary researchers and natural resource management practitioners, we seek to describe and explore these aspects of empirical cases of collaborative freshwater research and management. Drawing on cases from Indigenous community-based natural resource management in northern Australia, flood and drought risk management in Bulgaria, water management and climate change adaptation in the Pacific, and regional catchment and estuary management in Victoria and New South Wales in Australia, we identify lessons to support improved collaborative sustainable freshwater management research and practice. Cocreation represents an emerging approach to participation and collaboration in freshwater management research–practice and can be seen to constitute four interlinked and iterative phases: coinitiation, codesign, coimplementation, and coevaluation. For freshwater researchers and managers and their collaborators, paying attention to these phases and the ethical dilemmas that arise within each phase will support the cocreation of more effective and ethical research–practice through: sensitizing collaborators to the need for reflexivity in research–practice, proposing action research codesign as a method for managing emergent questions and outcomes, and supporting more equitable outcomes for collaborators through an emphasis on coevaluation and collaborative articulation of the links between research outputs and practice outcomes.

Enrolling Advisers in Governing Privatised Agricultural Extension in Australia: Challenges and Opportunities for the Research, Development and Extension System.

ABSTRACT Purpose: Current developments in the Australian agricultural research, development and extension (RD&E) system exemplify the complex governance challenges arising from the international privatisation of agricultural extension. Presenting early challenges emerging from a multi-stakeholder project aimed at stimulating the role of the private advisory sector in the RD&E system, this paper contributes to understanding change dynamics in the RD&E system. Methodology: The project applies action research to assist reframing current RD&E governance arrangements towards an enhanced, pluralistic and collaborative system. This paper uses multi-level transition theory (MLP) to explore the dynamics of change by describing the ‘regime’ of the current Australian RD&E system, wherein the project is an emergent ‘niche-in-the- making’. Findings: The regime-based challenges arising from the unfolding Australian project collaboration allow critical assessment of the first moves of niche formation initiated by the project. Initial findings suggest a persisting instrumentalist conceptualisation of the private sector’s role in the RD&E system solely as extension providers. This is in tension with the project vision of supporting new roles for private sector advisers as key actors in the governance of co-innovation processes. Practical implications: In describing these challenges and considering how the project’s action research can facilitate participant responses, we contribute to understanding how niche formation can be supported in Australia and internationally. Theoretical implications: The paper contributes to a research agenda related to the governance of agricultural advisory services via an analysis of social practice elements that constitute internal niche processes. Originality: Enabling critical analysis of the incumbent regime of the current RD&E system, this framework provides insights into how niche responses aimed at the RD&E system change can be supported.

Enacting resilience for adaptive water governance: a case study of irrigation modernization in an Australian catchment

Adaptive governance relies on the collaboration of a diverse set of stakeholders in multiple institutions and organizations at different times and places. In the context of unprecedented water policy and management reform in Australia over the past decade, we add to insights from resilience scholarship, which identifies adaptive governance as critical to improving complex social-ecological systems, such as water management. We present empirical research with agricultural industry stakeholders who are responding to a major change initiative to renew or modernize the largest irrigation system in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin and who ask: “What can a resilience assessment intervention contribute to adaptive water governance in this context?” Using resilience approaches and connecting these with insights from science and technology studies (STS), we found that a particular resilience assessment intervention supported dairy industry stakeholders to manage the complexity, uncertainty, and diversity of an irrigation modernization governance challenge. It did so by explicitly accounting for, representing, and aligning different water governing practices through the use of resilience concepts, a particular resilience assessment tool, and a participatory process for engaging social actors. Possibilities for adaptive governance emerged from the intervention in the form of new joint strategic actions and new understandings, alliances, and roles between people and institutions for addressing irrigation modernization.

Empowering farmers for increased resilience in uncertain times

As farmers continue to face increasingly uncertain and often rapidly changing conditions related to markets, climate or the policy environment, people involved in agricultural research, development and extension (RD&E) are also challenged to consider how their work can contribute to supporting farmer resilience. Research from the social sciences conducted in the past decade has focussed on adaptability or adaptive capacity as a key attribute for individuals and groups to possess for managing resilience. It is, therefore, timely to ask the following: do current ways of doing and organising RD&E in the dairy sector in New Zealand and Australia contribute to supporting farm adaptability? This paper reports on results from an examination of case studies of challenges to resilience in the dairy sector in Australia and New Zealand (i.e. dairy farm conversion, climate-change adaptation, consent to farm) and the contribution of dairy RD&E in enhancing resilience of farmers, their farms and the broader industry. Drawing on concepts from resilience studies and considering an empowerment perspective, the analysis of these cases suggest that, currently, agricultural RD&E supports adaptability in general, but varies in the strength of its presence and level of activity in the areas known to enhance adaptability. This analysis is used to generate principles for dairy scientists and others in the RD&E system to consider in (1) research designs, (2) engaging different farmers in research and (3) presenting research results differently. This represents a significant shift for the science and advisory communities to move to methods that acknowledge uncertainty and facilitate learning.