beyond the barbed wire fence is a foreign country: thinking and managing across tenures

Beyond the barbed wire fence is a foreign country: thinking and managing across tenures.

Steve Dovers

Symposium:

People and Place

Adelaide, September 2009

Steve Dovers and Carina Wyborn

Fenner School of Environment & Society

The Australian National University

Dovers & Wyborn, PPS, Adelaide, 2009 2

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...


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.

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?



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.


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.

(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.



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…”


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.


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, EnvCommissioners, 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?


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.


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…


…in case hadn’t noticed


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)


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.


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.


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.

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.

Especially important re lack of social and institutional factors.



(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.

The Environment Institute

beyond the barbed wire fence is a foreign country: thinking and managing across tenures

Business

barbed wire

environmental

australian

local govt

foreign country

previous experience

steve dovers

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