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Small group discussions on key issues - Challenges and opportunities for regional bodies

Working group

The following challenges and opportunities for regional bodies were identified by 17 working groups on Day One of the symposia. The feedback from each group is listed below.

Summary

Discussions on challenges facing regional bodies could be summarised under the following common issues:

  • Balancing the tension between production and environmental issues, ensuring programs are relevant to community needs, connecting with landholders, potential burn-out of volunteers
  • Managing short term tenured employment to address long term problems/ project needs, limited professional development for staff, ‘reinventing the wheel’, NRN is a people process, adequate funding of the linking processes compared with outputs
  • Regional bodies have responsibility but no authority, translating feel-good public desires into tangible on-farm benefit, timeframes of programs, achieving synergies by aligning regional bodies business with agency core business.

In addition, some general opportunities for regional bodies were also identified:

  • Build partnerships with stakeholders ( land managers, agencies, RD&E providers), develop ownership with industry, bring people together
  • Be innovative in engagement, capitalise on Landcare, value local knowledge, develop ‘bottom up’ approach and 2-way communication, build capacity for change
  • Set the long term agenda, achieve on-ground change.

Recordings of discussions

A spokesperson for each group reported back to the plenary session the details of the group discussions previously recorded on butcher’s paper. These comments considered both the current challenges and the opportunities presented to regional bodies in addressing natural resource management (NRM) issues.

Challenges for regional bodies

Group 1

  • Recognition of where NRM bodies fit in the plethora of organisations conducting NRM
  • How to balance the tension between production & environmental issues
  • How to get the message across that, we work with but are not part of Govt.
  • How to engage the other 80%
  • Potential burnout of volunteers

Group 2

  • Integrating 3 knowledges – indigenous, local, scientific
  • Balance between bottom down & top up
  • Resource arrows not just boxes
  • Maintain and develop knowledge
  • Engaging policy makers
  • Putting people in place of politics
  • Capturing market as well as policy

Group 3

  • Short term contracts lead to difficult continuity & developing relationships with landholders & institutions
  • Ability to attract professionals is limited
  • Limited professional development support & opportunities
  • Different interpretations of what NRM is
  • Some regional groups are still in storming stage & difficult to get programs in place

Group 4

  • To reach the “30%” that cause most of the problems – and not only those with enthusiasm for NRM

Group 5

  • Too many organisations and consultants going on-farm for many NRM related issues
  • Translating feel-good public desires into tangible on-farm benefits
  • How do we share or take practical steps to reshape the NRM knowledge systems

Group 6

  • Alignment of investment to the priority projects – funding at the real problems, balancing the social vs. biophysical resources
  • Funding for behaviour change vs. throwing $s at symptoms
  • Covering equity & transparency at the same time
  • Alignment of priorities at regional/local level (overcome the tension)
  • Implement the rhetoric of adaptive management & continuous improvement (learning together)
  • Cmth recognition of regional difference
  • Regional bodies having influence over policy
  • Get the bottom up vs. top down balance right
  • Guard against cost-shifting by the states on govt core business
  • Investors putting value on NRM being a people process
  • Where does NRM fit in the broader scheme

Group 7

  • Making the hard decisions on regulation
  • Keeping communities engaged
  • Regional bodies demonstrating results
  • Maintaining trust of the community
  • Ecological illiteracy

Group 8

  • Deliver outcomes in short time frames & still engage community
  • Conceptual level: challenge fact that regional effort minimal impact in global context (equity?)
  • Lack of appreciation of land managers creativity
  • Internal capacity building inside regional bodies as well as external
  • Integrating bottom-up talk with top-down walk
  • Govt. thinks regional bodies are the community – community thinks RBs are govt

Group 9

  • Long term funding (& commitment) needed
  • Funding the arrows
  • Eliminate competition between RBs
  • Understanding drivers better – economic
  • User friendly NRM language

Group 10

  • NRM is not just NAP, NHT1&2
  • There is a skewed emphasis on these programs, need to look at the other much larger $$ from other NRM spending
  • Are those $$ effective?
  • Build the capacity of policy makers & politicians to think holistically
  • Drought
  • How do you learn faster

Group 11

  • The RB/ CMA has money but no jurisdiction – few resources to implement catchment plans
  • PMPs need to be standardised, meet criteria
  • To get things done – quicker, smarter, getting outcomes
  • Time to consult properly in implementation & planning phase – farmers &community
  • Is to make NRM an issue as accepted as productivity
  • Green (biodiversity) vs. brown environment (waste mgmt) – make this mainstream
  • Extending acting/ thinking outside the farm boundary – down stream, across fence
  • Reluctance to share data as no clear vision of where info goes/ is used
  • Establishing a vision for the catchment

Group 12

  • Work with bottom 20% “tough nuts” landmanagers
  • How to encourage people to become comfortable with making & learning from mistakes – in terms of adaptive learning
  • Absence of market forces for NRM change
  • Put an aboriginal person on JSC – of indigenous choosing
  • Govt. challenge to fund permanent positions to retain knowledge & long-term projects in region – to stop reinventing the wheel
  • Keeping govt agenda out of community process
  • How to deal with social space & community conscious within land-holders business

Group 13

  • Layers of authority
  • Responsibility without authority
  • Communication on all levels
  • Aggregate personality of NRM constituents is different to that of the bulk of rural community
  • Time frames provided by Govt. & funding bodies
  • Policy change (driven by input from RBs)

Group 14

  • Economic rationalism
  • Alternative demands for funding
  • How to get skills into regions
  • Engaging upper echelons – policy makers, industry peak bodies

Group 15

  • Engaging all stakeholders
  • Can’t do it alone – but also trying to build their own identity independent of govt.
  • What happens if the $$ stop
  • Survive in spite of govt. policy & requirements – reports, $$ roll out, targets
  • What is their long term role?
  • Striking the balance in investment between strategic priority investments & equity/ capacity building
  • Service provision vs. supporting existing service providers
  • Achieving synergies by aligning RB business with Agency core business

Group 16

  • Translating local change to landscape impacts
  • Roles & responsibilities are still evolving (opportunity)
  • Should regulatory enforcement responsibilities be in the model
  • Linking requirements from above with community motivation
  • Timeframe of program
  • Grasp of M & E especially social & economic

Group 17

  • Bureaucracy, administration, budgeting, lack of political will
  • Reporting indicators – lack of consistency
  • Lack of awareness, scepticism
  • Lack of long-term vision
  • Lack of connection; global – local
  • Perception of NRM to landholders

Opportunities for regional bodies

Group 1

  • Strategic & operational engagement & linkages “on-ground” to reduce the dust
  • Marketing the NRM message to show it incorporates production – NRM by stealth
  • Strengthen communities – make more humour
  • Create alternative funding sources by writing “The extension officer’s guide to humour in community engagement”
  • Opportunity to share knowledge

Group 2

  • Development of tools for integrating all stakeholders in system solution
  • M & E documenting as a solution to knowledge erosion
  • Consensus regarding terminology
  • Spreading across scales
  • Sharing local success outwards
  • Taking a long term view

Group 3

  • Be innovative in engagement process
  • Can be an extension approach
  • Infrastructure support & funding available to deliver
  • Information available
  • Science & knowledge development in Govt is calling for delivery (eg. NRS at Indooroopilly)
  • Coordinate & mobilise the many various initiatives through partnerships, collaborations & other instruments
  • Community recognition of the effect landholders & concerned stakeholders are contributing
  • Influence institutions – put recommendations from concerned practitioners to NRM SC & PI SC (Canberra)

Group 4

  • Capitalise on the experience & skills built through landcare for training & mentoring facilitators

Group 5

  • Work with industry extension, private consultants & other NRM extension types to coordinate interactions with landholders
  • Carbon trading: trees = tractor hours (offsets)
  • Funding the arrow – Fed Gov bodies & local CMAs should be as much as the activities of the CMAs

Group 6

  • Bring all stakeholders together on complex problem
  • Increased funding
  • Bring the people with us – feedback from community important
  • Regional arrangements are the best arrangements so far

Group 7

  • Act before its too late
  • Its not too late
  • Support current model with results
  • Develop partnerships, tools to drive NRM

Group 8

  • Bring in/exchange information – understand & communicate national/international environmental/sustainable issues. Helps keep perspective & draw on international standards/ thinking/ policy
  • Lobby for institutional constraintsto be changed
  • Building/ calling for/ importance of building capacity

Group 9

  • Resource deployment – increase community input & forums for thisinto research
  • Improve extension process o drive research back to the community (Deliver)
  • Framing NRM best practice/ language to show economic value to landholders
  • Corporate investment/ Partnerships/ Privatisation/ Increase investment from urban Aust

Group 10

  • NRM RBs need to deliver up ↑
  • More connection/ sharing/ of learning between RBs
  • Better involvement of state agencies in NRM plans/ projects at local level
  • Sense of crisis fuelling our efforts
  • Greater recognition (and use of) the power/ value of networking & sharing knowledge
  • Instigate mentoring systems

Group 11

  • Responding to changed farming demographic
  • Collate & collect & use data – soil, water, biodiversity as well as information/ knowledge eg. QIRIS
  • RB to facilitate understanding of a coherent big picture - needs to have a comprehensive data set to establish good benchmarks
  • Equitable access to data – open knowledge base
  • Scaling issues – data, knowledge, information, & power up & down
  • Making bottom up process – timeframe with those of top down areas

Group 12

  • For NRM bodies entrenched in to community and carry on working
  • Encourage & develop market instruments for NRM change
  • Opportunity to learn for longer term & local graziers and their experience
  • Engage people – “when they want to know when they need to know it”! response & engage agenda when time presents
  • The NRM landscape is a people landscape
  • Move away from a top down approach to engage “individually”

Group 13

  • Enthusiasm/ building on networks
  • Achieve on-ground change through regional focus
  • Linking Landscapes, Lifestyles & Livelihoods
  • Partnerships between RBs, gov. bodies & corporate groups & industry bodies →other funding opportunities

Group 14

  • Life beyond dollars – more than just inspiration
  • Federal NRM funding a high priority
  • Need for innovative on-ground actions
  • Broader client base than just land managers

Group 15

  • Maintain credibility with NRM managers so that next version of the system involves them & continues the momentum
  • To achieve on-ground change
  • To keep on investing in capacity building and spaces for social interaction
  • Partnerships that have been formed
  • To connect and learn from each other & their successes & failures

Group 16

  • Level of goodwill/ partnerships/ networks
  • Better understanding of C & T of natural resources
  • Improved understanding of community – engagement – achieve goals
  • Roles & responsibilities – coordination & knowledge of community

Group 17

  • Recognition of local knowledge
  • Setting long-term agenda
  • 2-way communication, linking knowledge to on-ground outcomes
  • Lack of preconception allows development of NRM definition
  • Community ownership
  • New kinds of relationship to deliver new outcomes
  • Better lifestyles

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