Greg Leach

Preferred presentation format: refereed paper

Affiliation(s): Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines

Title: Greg Leach Position: Natural Resource Officer Organisation: Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines, and Coastal Zone Estuaries and Waterways Cooperative Research Centre. Indooroopilly Sciences Centre Contact email: Greg.Leach@ nrm.qld.gov.au Contact phone: 07 38969659

Key Words: Facilitate, Negotiate, Conflict, Extension Strategy, Participation

Natural Resources and Mines in Queensland has seen extension wither on the vine as a discipline and professional practice. NR&M staff have difficulty relating principles and practices of ‘agricultural extension’ with maturing planning, administration and compliance roles with natural resource users and managers in Queensland. ‘Agricultural extension’ founded on traditions of learning and knowledge development for furthering production and viability imperatives in Australia’s primary industries sector, does not equip NR&M staff with the necessary tools and skills for dealing with the increasingly conflictual decision-making and participation landscape of natural resource management. This paper presents seven different snapshots in Queensland’s NRM decision-making environment that highlight the need for applied research to identify effective participatory negotiation and conflict management approaches and tools. These cases are reflected against contemporary extension, participation, negotiation and organisational learning literature. It is evident that prevailing participatory philosophies of ‘cognitive learning leading to practice change’ are stifling effective debate and resolution of strategic agendas and paradigmatic clashes. This is most apparent when long-term staff and community stakeholders with a paradigm of ‘change through learning’ come in contact with a new wave of enforcement professionals in NR&M imbued with a paradigm of ‘change through legislation.’ Another key example is the gross assumption by Federal agencies that local representatives in regional bodies possess the requisite skills for effectively and equitably dealing with complex negotiation and conflictual decision-making processes. Senior management in NR&M are now re-engaging efforts to identify effective extension approaches, tools, skills and strategies to deal with these issues.

Key learning points

• Natural Resource Management Extension has a greater focus on dealing with different agendas, opinions and conflicts than traditional Agricultural Extension
• Extension in NR&M is floundering - The term extension needs to be renegotiated and reclaimed in natural resource management or abandoned in light of alternative terms that staff have ownership of
• Negotiation theory informs ‘NRM extension’ for dealing with conflictual decision-making environments, a characteristic of natural resource management
• Developing the NR&M extension strategy is best framed as a negotiation process itself using an action learning process to involve key strategic opponents in identifying how they want to do business
• Including negotiation theory in the extension will help the profession (and APEN) renegotiate its own identity and role and position itself within the social change agenda in rural, regional ‘and urban’ Australia