Australian resource and environmental management faces challenges from boundaries between disciplines, tenures, jurisdictions, and sectors that divide interconnected systems. Large ecological connectivity projects aim to manage biodiversity across these boundaries at unprecedented landscape scales, but have received little attention to the necessary social, policy, and institutional infrastructure required. For these ambitious projects to succeed in breaching boundaries where others have struggled, they must learn from past experiences integrating sectors and address the values, knowledge claims, rules, and organizations involved.
1. Beyond the barbed wire fence is a foreign
country: thinking and managing across tenures.
Steve Dovers
2. Symposium:
People and Place
Adelaide, September 2009
Steve Dovers and Carina Wyborn
Fenner School of Environment & Society
The Australian National University
3. Beyond the Barbed Wire Fence is a
Foreign Country
Proposition:
That Australian resource and environmental
management (and other policy and practical
enterprises as well) largely revolves around the
challenge of comprehending and managing
interconnected assets and processes, in spite of
the fractures in understanding and administration
imposes by boundaries, between disciplines,
tenures, jurisdictions and sectors...
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
2009 2
4. This talk…
Some persistent themes in
boundaries and boundary-crossing.
… especially tenure.
The latest venture – big ecological
connectivity projects.
Issues going forward:
-- need to match the science and vision
with social and institutional factors.
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
2009 3
5. Acknowledgements
This Symposium, for expanding „landscape
science‟ to include humans.
Land & Water Australia (RIP) for
supporting a research project on the social
and institutional aspects of cross-tenure
land management
-- who else would have, and who else now
could or would?
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
2009 4
6. Persistent boundaries…
1. Federalism: vertical disintegration.
2. State borders: historically defined divisions of
data, responsibility and ownership.
3. Local govt: ditto.
4. Portfolios and sectors: dividing integrated
systems into specialist parts.
5. Disciplines/professional knowledge systems:
understanding parts of the whole.
6. And tenure … where land can be used for only
one thing at a time.
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
2009 5
7. And especially tenure
Australian binary attitude to private
versus other tenures – for most
Australians, beyond the barbed wire
fence is a foreign country.
EXAMPLES:
On- and off-reserve biodiversity conservation.
Endless angst over distinguishing public and
private benefit in conservation and NRM.
Paranoia over subsidies (unlike elsewhere).
Pastoral leases – multiple use as unthinkable to
many people.
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
2009 6
8. (A diversion…)
Tenure and other boundaries in the
urban domain.
Fluid in an era of:
-- densification of urban form.
-- privatisation of public space.
Considerable research and debate in this
area currently (eg. State of Australian
Cities Conferences 2003, 05, 07, 09).
..invites some urban-rural comparison.
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
2009 7
9. Walking and chewing gum at the same time:
Earl Grey to the NSW Governor in 1848:
“I think it essential that it should be generally
understood that leases granted for this purpose
give the grantees only an exclusive right of
pasturage for their cattle, and of cultivating such
land as they may require within the large limits
thus assigned to them, but that these leases are
not intended to deprive the natives of their
former right to hunt over these districts, or to
wander over them in search of subsistence, in the
manner to which they have been heretofore
accustomed…”
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
2009 8
10. Other forgotten leads..
The recognition, disappearance and emergence of
a doctrine of public trust in Australia.
The emergence and then disappearance of duty
of care on private lands re land degradation.
(On these three, see Holmes, Bonyhady and Bradsen in: Dovers
(ed) 2000. Environmental history and policy: still settling
Australia. Oxford University Press.)
Result: struggle to manage across tenures, and
alienation from much of the landscape, and from
knowledge of natural systems and primary
production, of the majority of Australians.
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
2009 9
11. But, much boundary crossing…
1. Federalism: never-ending experiments in framework
policies, coordination - vertical policy integration.
2. States: NRS, MBD, AALC, etc.
3. Local govt: regional planning, ROCS.
4. Portfolios/sectors: ICM, ICZM, CMAs, Env
Commissioners, sustainability offices, RFA, NWI, IDCs –
horizontal policy integration.
5. Disciplines: integrative research, double degrees,
schools of environment, etc.
6. Tenure: pasture protection boards, Landcare, covenants,
stewardship payments, etc.
… the past and present of Aust environmental
management - how effective have we been?
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
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12. Proposition confirmed
Few significant resource and
environmental management problems do
not involve boundary-crossing challenges.
Reconstructed as exercises in
implementing ecologically sustainable
development
-- the complexity and difficulty of
boundary constraints enlarges,
incorporating a greater number (and
imperviousness) of political, legal and
administrative boundaries.
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
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13. The latest and biggest…
Large ecological connectivity
projects - >30 currently.
Landscape scale = „00s to „000s km.
Relatively recent, experimental, and
largely non-govt led.
Longer history overseas -- Y2Y
Yellowstone-to-Yukon, A2A Algonquin-to-
Adirondack; B2B Baja-to-Bering Sea; PP
Panther’s Path.
Conservation-by-acronym…
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
2009 12
16. A new idea? Connectivity thinking
in Middle Earth in its Third Age…
“…of the Old Forest many tales have been
told: all that now remains is but an
outlier of its northern march. Time was
when a squirrel could go from tree to
tree from what is now the Shire to
Dunland west of Isengard. In those lands
I journeyed once, and many things wild
and strange I knew.”
(Elrond)
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2009 15
17. Key elements
Biodiversity and ecological processes
cannot be preserved and managed within
boundaries:
-- strongly emerging ecological science.
-- imperative to manage biodiversity across
tenures and jurisdictions – large scale.
-- a vision of engagement with people and
communities – ownership?
-- highly varied scale, style, resources.
-- little suggestion of requisite social, policy,
institutional and administrative infrastructure.
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18. The challenge
Coordination of policy and on-ground
management over greater scales, and
across more boundaries, than ever before:
-- public-private tenures.
-- different public tenures.
-- different private tenures.
-- levels of government and jurisdictions.
-- policy sectors and agencies.
-- disciplines and knowledge systems.
-- and across multiple values and expectations,
not just landscape scale ecological imperatives.
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19. Boundaries residual and ignored
Values and expectations – roles, uses,
responsibilities, priorities.
The primacy of knowledge claims –
ecological, social, economic.
Institutions, beyond marginal adjustments
to existing organisations and loose links,
to possible new rules and property rights.
… these have received little attention in
connectivity research and initiatives.
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20. But, many rehearsals…
Are
big connectivity projects being
developed in isolation:
-- from one another?
-- from previous experience?
Lessons available from past efforts:
-- ICM, ICZM, regional orgs, strategic
planning, etc, etc.
Especiallyimportant re lack of social
and institutional factors.
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21. (In)conclusion…
Australian resource and environmental
management can be constructed as being largely
a struggle within and against boundaries.
We have long experience, of contested efficacy,
and of questionable accumulated learning.
Large scale ecological connectivity projects are
the latest and the most ambitious enterprise.
These may refashion our abilities and
achievements, or be crippled as they try to
breach boundaries.
If the former, then more and early attention
should be paid to social and institutional
dimensions, and to previous experience.
Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide,
2009 20