Tiffany H. Morrison

Coral reefs in the Anthropocene

Coral reefs support immense biodiversity and provide important ecosystem services to many millions of people. Yet reefs are degrading rapidly in response to numerous anthropogenic drivers. In the coming centuries, reefs will run the gauntlet of climate change, and rising temperatures will transform them into new configurations, unlike anything observed previously by humans. Returning reefs to past configurations is no longer an option. Instead, the global challenge is to steer reefs through the Anthropocene era in a way that maintains their biological functions. Successful navigation of this transition will require radical changes in the science, management and governance of coral reefs.

Multiscalar Governance and Regional Environmental Management in Australia

Abstract At a moment when regionalisation and regionalism are being widely promoted across a range of policy sectors, this paper argues that much regional activity, including regional environmental management, is often the product of interactions, resources and opportunities at other scales. The paper shows how local and extra-regional interactions, resources and opportunities influence environmental management at the regional level in Australia by the development of a case analysis of Far North Queensland. It finds that much of the current thinking about regionalisation and regionalism ignores these multiscalar dimensions. This can impede and undermine efforts to manage the environment effectively at the regional level. The paper identifies some opportunities to improve regional environmental management activities in Australia and draws out the broader implications for other policy sectors and other countries embracing the movement towards regionalism/regionalisation. The relationship between governance by network at the regional level and the power and control of central government is highlighted. The paper also calls for further research into how governments and other actors successfully manage multiscalar relations of governance in order to promote (or impede) specific public policy initiatives.

Pursuing Rural Sustainability at the Regional Level: Key Lessons from the Literature on Institutions, Integration, and the Environment

Regional institutional integration is viewed by many as an essential precursor to the achievement of rural sustainability in that it addresses increasing concerns about institutional complexity in rural areas and the need to manage ecosystems at a bioregional scale. Governments are requiring planners to engage citizens, organizations, and institutions in regional strategic planning, regional organizational amalgamation, and regional administrative-boundary reconfiguration to achieve such integration. Despite this popularity, these approaches still are not well thought out. In particular, there has been little critical hypothesis development on institutions and regional integration by which planning practice toward achieving rural sustainability can be guided. This article seeks to show how certain elements of the scholarship in a range of disciplines within and outside planning can shed light on the different dimensions of this concept. This review enables important lessons to be drawn for planners, citizens, and governments concerned with institutions, integration, and the environment.

The convergence of regional governance discourses in rural Australia: Enduring challenges and constructive suggestions.

Abstract Regional governance is being embraced across rural Australia by a diverse ensemble of actors, including rural communities, private corporations, environmental activists and government agencies. The promoters of regional governance argue that utilising approaches to governance such as ‘regional partnerships’ improves the functionality and democracy of governance and enables ‘sustainable regional development’. Closer scrutiny reveals that the regional governance ideal appeals to this diverse range of interests in contradictory ways. Concerns for environmental, social and economic sustainability intersect with concerns about economic decline, community empowerment, fragmented government, and broad-scale resource use conflicts in rural areas. Against a backdrop of international trends in ecosystem management, new regionalism, collaborative planning and new public management, this article reviews the reasons why these diverse actors have converged on similar conceptual terrain in their search for rural sustainability. This serves to illuminate the contradictions inherent in this conceptual convergence, the challenges to achieving the regional governance ideal, and enables us to posit some constructive suggestions as to how these challenges can be overcome.

Evolving polycentric governance of the Great Barrier Reef

Significance Global sustainability depends on robust environmental governance regimes. An investigation of the Great Barrier Reef regime between 1975 and 2016 reveals how complex environmental regimes become increasingly structurally dense and eventually reach a point of stabilization. However, structural complexity and stability alone do not necessarily mean the system is robust. Instead, a complex but stable structure can mask exogenous change, which then can generate more endogenous change; this phenomenon has implications for the environmental outcomes of complex regimes. Therefore, it is vital to anticipate and account for change in designing, implementing, and evaluating sustainable environmental governance. A growing field of sustainability science examines how environments are transformed through polycentric governance. However, many studies are only snapshot analyses of the initial design or the emergent structure of polycentric regimes. There is less systematic analysis of the longitudinal robustness of polycentric regimes. The problem of robustness is approached by focusing not only on the structure of a regime but also on its context and effectiveness. These dimensions are examined through a longitudinal analysis of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) governance regime, drawing on in-depth interviews and demographic, economic, and employment data, as well as organizational records and participant observation. Between 1975 and 2011, the GBR regime evolved into a robust polycentric structure as evident in an established set of multiactor, multilevel arrangements addressing marine, terrestrial, and global threats. However, from 2005 onward, multiscale drivers precipitated at least 10 types of regime change, ranging from contextual change that encouraged regime drift to deliberate changes that threatened regime conversion. More recently, regime realignment also has occurred in response to steering by international organizations and shocks such as the 2016 mass coral-bleaching event. The results show that structural density and stability in a governance regime can coexist with major changes in that regime’s context and effectiveness. Clear analysis of the vulnerability of polycentric governance to both diminishing effectiveness and the masking effects of increasing complexity provides sustainability science and governance actors with a stronger basis to understand and respond to regime change.

What 'Whole-of-government' Means for Environmental Policy and Management: An Analysis of the Connecting Government Initiative

In this article, we comment on what new ‘whole-of- government’ (WG) initiatives mean for environmental policy and management in Australia. In particular, we focus on the recently released Australian Government Management Advisory Committee report, Connecting Government (2004). The nature of WG as a general public policy concept is explored before the relationship between WG and environmental policy and management is explained. Our review of Connecting Government shows it to be conceptually precise, appropriately focused on extra-structural issues, such as process and culture, and sensitive to the role of extra-governmental actors (such as community and industry actors) in governance. In addition, it usefully highlights the fact that different approaches to governmental connectivity are required for different kinds of policy problems. While Connecting Government acknowledges an enlarged role for community and industry actors in the formulation and implementation of public policy, it is, unfortunately, largely uncritical of the governance problems that this role potentially entails.

Back to the Future? Planning for environmental outcomes and the new Caring for our Country program

Abstract The Australian government Caring for our Country (CfoC) program, first announced in 2008, has sought to build on and enhance previous experience with Australian natural resource management policy. This paper critically examines the initial design, planned delivery, and first round of competitive funding outcomes of the new program. This analysis shows that the initial design and delivery of the CfoC model was ad hoc, politicised, and lacking in transparency. The paper concludes that a more systematic and transparent approach for achieving sustainable environmental outcomes is required in order for this new program to achieve its intended objectives. These implications are of interest to Australian and international geographers, natural resource planners, scientists and policy makers concerned with the design, delivery and outcomes of large natural resource and environmental management programs.

Planning, governance and rural futures in Australia and the USA: revisiting the case for rural regional planning

Rural regions in post-industrial countries confront significant new challenges, particularly in relation to climate, biodiversity, unconventional resource development and energy. Yet at a time when the contours of these challenges are still being sketched, and preliminary, planned interventions undertaken, the practice of rural planning finds itself at a low ebb. We examine two ‘critical cases’, one each from Australia and the USA, to explore the issues and options for capacity of rural regional planning to surmount these new challenges. Our examination indicates the urgent need for a renewed discourse on rural regional planning.

New Directions for Understanding the Spatial Resilience of Social–Ecological Systems

Abstract The concept of spatial resilience has brought a new focus on the influence of multi-scale processes on the dynamics of ecosystems. Initial ideas about spatial resilience focused on coral reefs and emphasized escalating anthropogenic disturbances across the broader seascape. This perspective resonated with a new awareness of global drivers of change, such as growth in international trade and shifts in climate, and the need to respond by scaling up governance and management. We review recent trends and emerging ideas in spatial resilience, using coral reefs and dependent communities as exemplars of multi-scale social–ecological systems. Despite recent advances, management and governance of ecosystems remain spatially fragmented and constrained to small scales. Temporally, many interventions still miss or ignore warning signals and struggle to cope with history, politics, long-term cumulative pressures, feedbacks, and sudden surprises. Significant recent progress has been made in understanding the relevance of spatial and temporal scale, heterogeneity, networks, the importance of place, and multi-scale governance. Emerging themes include better integration of ecology and conservation with social and economic science, and incorporating temporal dynamics in spatial analyses. A better understanding of the multi-scale spatial and temporal processes that drive the resilience of linked social-ecosystems will help address the widespread mismatch between the scales of ongoing ecological change and effective long-term governance of land- and seascapes.

A Comparative Analysis of the Transformation of Governance Systems: Land-Use Planning for Flood Risk

Abstract This paper seeks to address a deficit in the literature by undertaking a comparative case analysis of two governance systems for flood-prone areas in the state of Queensland, Australia, where flood governance consisted of two different regimes: adaptive and precautionary. We compare the evolution and characteristics of the two regimes, with a focus on each regimes ability to detect change, interact across scales and transform after the 2011 flood disaster in Queensland. We find that the challenges for adaptive governance include ad hoc successes, a lack of overarching guidance and regulation, and limited capacity to exploit results, but the challenges of moving to a precautionary style are also substantial. We argue that an adaptive–precautionary typology has limited utility, and that empirical evidence at the local–regional scale demonstrates a mix of both which are heavily path-dependent. The grand assumption that governance in general should move from precaution and hierarchy to adaptiveness and networks is far more complicated at the local–regional scale. Given the dominant preference globally for incrementalism and softer ways of governing, we call for further research on how adaptive modes of governance might be both reinforced by and scaled up over time to achieve more precautionary overarching strategies.