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Pathways to good practice in regional NRM governance
A Land and Water
Australia funded project, supported by Department of
Sustainability &
Environment (Vic) and Department of Natural Resources (NSW)
BULLETIN
NO. 4
20th
December 2007
Project
Reports
Following on from the Publication of
Project Report 1 in December 2006, which presented our
governance principles, this year we have completed and
circulated three more reports.
Report 2: NRM
Governance in Australia: NRM Programs and Governance Structures documents
the structural components of the Australian NRM system with
particular attention to current arrangements for the regional
delivery of NRM.
Report 3: Sustainable
Development and Governance: The ‘Big Ideas’ Influencing
Australian NRM maps the links among three societal change
agendas – sustainable development, neoliberalism and governance – and shows how these have influenced natural
resource management (NRM) in Australia. The purpose of this
report is to enable NRM policy-makers and practitioners to
better appreciate the strengths of the current system and to see
where opportunities to improve upon the NRM system might reside.
Report 4: Strengths
and Challenges of NRM Governance: Interviews with Key Players
and Insights from the Literature presents the findings of
interviews and meetings undertaken in March and May 2007 on the
strengths and challenges of NRM governance in our nine partner
regions, as well as the state and national levels.
These three reports have been circulated to
the project partners, and are available on our web site at: http://www.geol.utas.edu.au/geography/nrmgovernance/reports.htm
In the process of analysing data for Report
4, and through on-going discussions with partners and inside the
research team, we have also made modifications to the Governance
Principles presented in Report 1. The revised principles are
presented in a draft paper, Governance Principles for Natural Resource Management, which will be
soon available at the above website.
Progress
on the Governance Standard
Over the past six months, we have been
developing a Governance Standard and Assessment Tool. A trial
version was sent out to our partners in September. Several
partner regions have now completed and returned their governance
self-assessments (thanks!), and we hope to receive the remaining
responses in the near future. We will use these responses, in
combination with the interview material described in Report 4,
to (i) draw conclusions about the current state of governance in
our partner regions and related jurisdictions and (ii) formulate
a set of good practice guidelines around each of the governance
principles.
As a result of feedback received so far
from the trial, in conjunction with advice from an expert in
standards design, the NSW Natural Resources Commission, and some
re-thinking on our part, we are currently developing a new
version of the standard. Major proposed changes include: (i)
collapse of the separate regional and government components into
one system-wide standard, that includes outcomes and indicators
for each or our eight governance principles; and (ii) a separate
tool that does away with the qualitative measurement scale and
prescriptive evidence specifications of the trial version and
instead offers a range of evidence possibilities that can be
used to demonstrate performance against each outcome. We will
circulate copies of the new Standard and Assessment Tool in
February 2008.
We would like to express our appreciation
for the effort and time that partners have expended on
completing the trial standard, and assure them that even though
the trial version has now been superseded, data from the trial
will still provide a solid basis for describing the current
status of NRM governance and formulating the good practice
guidelines. This status report will be given in the next project
report, due in February 2008. More information on the trial and
the development of the standard will be given to partners at the
Partner Reference Group teleconference on January 22, 2008.
Sharing
Results of the Project
In order to share the outcomes from our
work with a wider NRM audience, we propose to:
·
Hold a workshop just prior to the General
Managers’ Forum in early 2008
·
Make a presentation on the project to the NRM
Knowledge Conference, ‘Changing Landscapes’ in Melbourne
in April 2008.
We will keep you posted about these two
events.
CONTACT
For information about the project, please contact Dr Julie Davidson, School of Geography & Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania , (03) 6226 7675, Julie.Davidson@utas.edu.au
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