Ruth Beilin

Farmland abandonment : Threat or opportunity for biodiversity conservation? A global review

Farmland abandonment is changing rural landscapes worldwide, but its impacts on biodiversity are still being debated in the scientific literature. While some researchers see it as a threat to biodiversity, others view it as an opportunity for habitat regeneration. We reviewed 276 published studies describing various effects of farmland abandonment on biodiversity and found that a studys geographic region, selected metrics, assessed taxa, and conservation focus significantly affected how those impacts were reported. Countries in Eurasia and the New World reported mainly negative and positive effects of farmland abandonment on biodiversity, respectively. Notably, contrasting impacts were recorded in different agricultural regions of the world that were otherwise similar in land-use and biodiversity characteristics. We showed that the conservation focus (pre- or post-abandonment) in different regions is an important factor influencing how scientists address the abandonment issue, and this may affect how lan...

Photo‐elicitation and the agricultural landscape: ‘seeing’ and ‘telling’ about farming, community and place

This paper explores a photo‐elicitation study with farmers in the steeply degraded hill country of south‐eastern Australia. The photographers are the participating family farmers in the study. Their efforts to explain and to change their farming practice are linked to their relationship to the landscape, to the local Landcare conservation groups and to the imperatives of contemporary production systems. Their use of their landscape images is deliberate. They send a message to others about the complexity of being a ‘farmer’, a land manager and a conservationist. The photo‐elicitation process empowers them to articulate closely held values and understandings about their lives and work in this difficult terrain.

Framing disaster resilience : The implications of the diverse conceptualisations of “bouncing back”

Purpose – To confront the increasingly devastating impacts of disasters and the challenges that climate change is posing to disaster risk management (DRM) there is an imperative to further develop DRM. The resilience approach is emerging as one way to do this, and in the last decade has been strongly introduced into the policy arena, although it is not new for DRM practitioners and researchers. Nevertheless, resilience is a highly contested issue, and there is no agreed definition of it, which has resulted in confusion for stakeholders when applying it to practice. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how resilience is framed by researchers and DRM practitioners. Design/methodology/approach – The analytical framework used was Hajers “social-interactive discourse theory”, combined with analysis of government documents, in-depth interviews with practitioners and observation of field and practices within the context of the Natural Disaster Resilience Program in Queensland, Australia. Findi...

Co-constructing the sustainable city: how indicators help us “grow” more than just food in community gardens

Since Agenda 21, local governments have sought ways of engaging urban citizens in the creation of more sustainable cities. Community garden (CG) activities are frequently described as contributing positively to the development of socially and environmentally sustainable local communities, yet a suitable set of indicators for valuing these benefits are yet to be established. Indicators were formed through a participatory process allowing individuals to use and learn from them. This can usefully contribute to policy decisions and be meaningful to urban planners and local community gardeners. A set of social and ecological indicators that aligned with local government policy areas and accountability frameworks were developed. Indicators were derived with local government officers, CG members, and industry experts. The practical necessity of devising indicators that can realistically be monitored by CG participants and be of political and ideological use to local governments and wider community stakeholders, is demonstrated.

Introduction: Governing for urban resilience

There is urgency afoot to acknowledge the disconnection between ecological realities and the persistence of past ways of constructing the social, as if it is in isolation from the ecological. The urban is the common ground: an endlessly burgeoning, frequently contested home to spaces, institutions and people. ‘Governing for urban resilience’ brings together research that considers the meaningfulness and possibilities inherent in conceptualising and implementing social-ecological resilience as a process for radical social change and offering a lens for connecting these urban narratives. The urban is then acknowledged as a site of heightened complexity, harbouring diverse social and ecological realities and imaginative potential. The Special Issue challenges past ways of ordering and limiting the city, while building on more recent interpretations of it as interwoven processes associated with enhancing connectivity – whether ecosystems or social networks. Four themes emerge from the articles: locating action; using scale to interrogate and facilitate change; acknowledging the asymmetry of power relations in order to focus on social justice as critical to change; and incorporating local knowledge and the catalytic force of memory to assist that change. The papers have applied the ideas of resilience and social-ecological resilience to their existing urban research, asking, in the main, whether this lens assists us to know more about what has occurred in the case studies. Overall, the outcomes suggest the strengths and weaknesses of policies and projects and in some cases the potentially transformative processes that encourage a social-ecological resilience framing for future research.

Transition Landscapes and Social Networks: Examining On-Gound Community Resilience and its Implications for Policy Settings in Multiscalar Systems

Community based natural resource management groups contribute to landscape scale ecological change through their aggregation of local ecological knowledge. However, the social networks at the heart of such groups remain invisible to decision makers as evidenced in funding cuts and strategic policy documents. Our research is a pilot study of the social networks in two peri-urban landscapes in Victoria, Australia. We describe the social network analysis undertaken with regard to natural resource management issues. The findings are assessed against the qualities of resilience: diversity, modularity, connectivity, and feedback loops. A social network analysis tool is discussed with participants to assess its usefulness on-ground and with agency staff involved in the project. We concluded that the sociograms are useful to the groups, however, the management of the tool itself is complex and calls for agency personnel to facilitate the process. Overall, the project did make visible the networks that contribute to a multiscalar social and ecological resilience in these landscapes, and in this regard, their use is of benefit to policy makers concerned with supporting networks that build social resilience.

Biosecurity risk and peri-urban landholders - Using a stakeholder consultative approach to build a risk communication strategy

This article presents a straightforward and highly participatory methodology for addressing government agencies’ concerns with effective communication strategies for biosecurity when stakeholders are diverse and there is uncertainty about their levels of knowledge. The case study was among peri‐urban landholders in an area where serious animal disease infestation has occurred within the last 10 years. Initially we engaged stakeholders in a consultative process that included establishing a stakeholder influence and interest map for both weeds and animal diseases. This was followed with a mental model approach involving surveys and in‐depth interviews. We elicited information about landholders’ knowledge, practices, values and beliefs regarding biosecurity risk. Our consultative process generated examples that indicate that effective risk communication relies on establishing and affirming mutual levels of trust and credibility between landholders and agencies. While this finding is not surprising, we argue that attention to stakeholder consultative processes is central to overcoming barriers to changing practices and building awareness. Secondly, our data confirmed that while smaller landholders were the initial target for the communication, all landholders represented a similar level of biosecurity risk. Therefore, our approach was critical in overcoming external assumptions about particular actors. Finally, our data pointed to the need to develop a whole of landscape approach to biosecurity risk communication strategy in consultation with local stakeholders.

Where's the Fire? Co-Constructing Bushfire in the Everyday Landscape

This research studied factors that residents of a fire-prone Victorian community used when deciding whether to leave their homes on a day officially declared “Catastrophic,” the highest Fire Danger Rating. Taking a social constructivist perspective, we explore how the expert view of bushfire risk, represented by Fire Danger Ratings, is interpreted within the context of local understandings of the landscape and social memory of bushfire. Residents perceive a disconnection between the Fire Danger Rating and local reality. Their social construction of bushfire is related to social and ecological memory, which comprises physical experience of the landscape and local fire knowledge narratives. The exclusion of this social complexity from Fire Danger Ratings diminished their utility as a way of helping people make meaning of bushfire. We propose that fire management agencies work with communities to develop a co-constructed view of bushfire risk that incorporates local bushfire knowledge into Fire Danger Ratings.

Gaining Legitimacy and Losing Trust: Stakeholder Participation in Ecological Risk Assessment for Marine Protected Area Management

This study examines the application of a qualitative Ecological Risk Assessment (ERA) tool to initiate management planning and community engagement in newly legislated Marine Protected Areas. Scientists and the agency expected the participatory element to increase the legitimacy of management by achieving consensus about management priorities as well as to engender trust in science and agency procedures. We point to the complex nature of participatory engagement when expert and lay knowledge are combined while an agencys claim to legitimacy rests on scientific judgements. While community engagement offered agency staff an additional way to claim legitimacy it also challenged the way planners, rangers as well as community representatives previously attained trust.

Stakeholder participation in building resilience to disasters in a changing climate

ABSTRACT The resilience perspective has emerged as a plausible approach to confront the increasingly devastating impacts of disasters; and the challenges and uncertainty climate change poses through an expected rise in frequency and magnitude of hazards. Stakeholder participation is posited as pivotal for building resilience, and resilience is not passive; rather, stakeholders are actively involved in the process of building resilience. Who is involved and how they are involved are crucial aspects for developing resilience in practice. Nevertheless, there are few empirical studies available to inform theory or show how these issues are addressed. This study focuses on revealing how practitioners frame the issue of participation in relation to resilience, its relevance to a changing climate and how, in consequence, they construct practices. Using Hajers [(1995). The politics of environmental discourse: Ecological modernization and the policy process. New York] ‘Social-interactive discourse theory’, in this interdisciplinary research, we study the frames and subsequent practices developed around a disaster management policy initiative in Australia: the Natural Disaster Resilience Program in Queensland. What emerges from the research findings as critical and requiring urgent attention is stakeholder and especially local government and community participation, and for this to become socially relevant, challenges such as meaningful communication and power structures need to be addressed. What is also critical is to move from experiential learning to social learning. Additionally, the results presented here offer empirical evidence on how broadening the pool of actors can be implemented, and the opportunities that this opens up for building resilience.