The six chapters in Part 2 of this volume chart some of the major policy imperatives driving current institutional experimentation, across different social and geographic contexts and in different policy sectors.
The first three of these chapters deal with governance challenges confronting the quite different social-demographic policy contexts in which Australians live – urban, rural and coastal – and the responses needed in terms of improved approaches to regional and federal governance. Chapter 4, Mal Peters’ presentation ‘Towards a wider debate on federal and regional governance: the rural dimension’, highlights rural dissatisfaction with current Australian federalism and the issues underpinning the perceived ‘city-country divide’. It argues the case for a change in the structure of Australia’s governments in the long term, including the possibility of new states or regional governments. In Chapter 5, ‘Rescuing urban regions: the federal agenda’, Brendan Gleeson makes the parallel argument that, of course, ‘regionalism’ is not just a rural issue, emphasising that urban regions face their own governance challenges which similarly, albeit differently, mitigate in favour of new institutional strategies for recognising the role of urban regions within national discussions and frameworks on regional policy.
Chapter 6, Mike Berwick’s presentation, ‘The challenge of coastal governance: federalism and regionalism in Australia’, addresses the failure of Australia’s current dysfunctional federal, state and local system of governance to deal effectively with the ‘seachange’ phenomenon. It highlights the complex impacts of high growth rates on coastal communities and explores priorities for a more responsive federal-regional-local system that embodies stronger principles of participatory democracy.
The next three papers shift from the geographic context to contemporary challenges of governance seen from the perspective of different policy sectors: environmental management, economic development and human services. In Chapter 7, ‘Adaptive governance: the challenge for regional natural resource management’, Jenny Bellamy examines the current complexity of Australian federal-state-regional institutional arrangements in response to the rapidly growing pressures for sustainable natural resource management. The paper argues the case for a national shift in the focus of these reforms from ‘top-down’ administrative approaches towards the development of a more participative, deliberative and adaptive governance system. It proposes essential attributes of this adaptive governance system to deal with the long-term challenges of inevitable environmental and societal change. In Chapter 8, ‘Regionalism and economic development: achieving an efficient framework’, Andrew Beer reveals equivalent challenges in the way in which national and state policies aimed at regional economic development – in particular, regionally-specific structural adjustment – fail to achieve their goals in practice at the local and regional level. The paper identifies the tensions between centrally-driven regional initiatives and regional needs, especially in the current context of neoliberalism, and argues the case for institutional reforms to deliver more effective regional development.
In Chapter 9, ‘Reconceiving federal-state-regional arrangements in health’, Andrew Podger deals with the governance challenges facing Australia’s health system. He explores the applicability of the subsidiarity principle and the relevance of whole-of-government approaches in the Australian health system, emphasising that the essential attributes of a successful long-term Commonwealth-funded public health system include a transition to new national-regional arrangements. Here, a specific model is suggested for discussion, further setting the scene for the institutional questions confronted by the next part of the volume, but also highlighting that these are ‘here and now’ practical issues in the short term, and not simply questions for debates about long-term constitutional reform.
Together, Chapters 7 to 9 demonstrate that across all three dimensions of sustainability – environmental, economic and social – the quest for effective policy capacity is increasing pressure for institutional reform both on a national scale and at the regional level.