Notwithstanding the fact that, as a wicked policy problem, NRM poses significant governance challenges, it is increasingly evident that a regional and systemic focus in NRM is a critical mechanism for addressing the sustainability of our interconnected natural and social systems. So what are the essential elements of ‘good’ adaptive regional NRM governance? Essential attributes recognised both nationally and internationally include (e.g. Folke et al 2005; Bellamy et al 2006; Lebel et al 2006; Davidson et al 2006):
Participatory: engagement with stakeholders being inclusive of the range of values of people involved or affected by NRM decision-making. Critical for building trust and legitimacy;
Deliberative: accommodating debate, dissent, mediation and negotiation. Critical for developing shared understanding and trust and enhancing adaptive capacity;
Multi-layered: not necessarily neatly hierarchical but able to handle scale-dependent governance challenges and territorial or sectoral cross-boundary interactions and coordination. Critical to adaptive responses at appropriate levels;
Nested: multiple centres or authorities for creating opportunities for understanding and for servicing needs in spatially heterogeneous contexts. Critical for providing flexibility for adapting to local contexts (i.e. knowledge, values, community capacity for action and social and environmental conditions) and creating appropriate learning and decision-making opportunities;
Accountable and responsive: relating to both local communities and higher authorities in terms of decisions and actions that are responsive to changing circumstances, performance, knowledge and societal objectives and preferences. Critical to efficiency and adaptive capacity of regional NRM governance to respond to and shape change in the long term;
Just: that is, social justice in relation to the distribution of benefits and involuntary risks. Critical to enhancing the adaptive capacity of vulnerable groups and society as a whole; and
Well informed: embracing new forms of knowledge to deal with complexity and uncertainty associated with change in interconnected social and natural systems. Critical to social acceptability and adaptive governance capacity.
Is it possible to design and implement such an adaptive regional NRM style of governance within the Australian federal system that is effective, legitimate and durable in delivering sustainable outcomes for our linked social and natural systems? Although the ‘jury is still out’ on the outcomes of the new regional NRM delivery experiments, the multi-layered and polycentric nature of Australia’s federal system for NRM is revealing some opportunities for a more adaptive, participative and deliberative regional style of governance.
A number of key lessons are emerging from current regional NRM practice that are critical elements necessary for enhancing adaptive capacity of NRM governance within Australia’s federal system. Firstly, the regional focus is broadening the scope and scale of the collaboration on NRM (that is, both geographically large and institutionally broad and multi-levelled). Second, it is fostering new forms of participation of regional communities in NRM policy decision-making through changing the roles of state and societal actors and allowing social actors more capacity to coordinate amongst themselves and make collective decisions on action in the pursuit of societal goals with less central government control. Third, it is enabling the emergence of new network configurations or arrangements that connect individuals, organisations, agencies and institutions at multiple organisational or political levels. These inevitably have potential to enhance cooperation amongst the different spheres of government, communities and individual decision-makers who all act or have influence at multiple political scales. Fourthly, a clear recognition is emerging of the central role of local government in regional NRM and its delivery; although to date there has been very limited devolution of powers and limited capacity present in local government to enable this increasing role to be realised (see Bell this volume, Berwick this volume). Finally, it is encouraging new mechanisms for linking science, policy and society in which ‘science’ is more ‘nested’ in decision making, rather than external to it. Such mechanisms have greater capacity to value and engage multiple sources of knowledge and also the potential to provide improved opportunities for collaborative learning.
Although regional NRM governance is not the sole solution or panacea for NRM within our complex federal system (see Head and Ryan 2004; Lane and McDonald 2005; Moore 2005; Bell and Park 2006), these emerging attributes have promising implications for the potential of more participative and deliberative regional governance approaches to enhance adaptive capacity in our interconnected social and natural systems.
Undoubtedly, as Brown (this volume) proposes, substantive reform in Australia’s complex federal system of government is ultimately critical to the move towards social, economic and environmental sustainability. Given the urgency for response posed by the sustainability challenge, in the short to medium term, what is evident is the need for an enabling environment for the regional NRM agenda that moves beyond the current limited focus on an adaptive form of public management (i.e. administrative adaptiveness) towards a more adaptive NRM governance system that enables social and political learning at multiple levels and ‘nested’ centres of decision-making across public and private sectors. At the most basic level, such an NRM governance system would need to:
encompass the existing and emerging regional NRM roles and functions (including powers, responsibilities and resources) of the current three spheres of government;
enable a cooperative and deliberative (rather than hierarchical) governance style;
accommodate diversity in NRM policy development and implementation strategies (e.g. a mix of networks, hierarchies, and market-based instruments);
be sufficiently flexible to allow adaptation to diverse and changing local regional contexts and circumstances; and
value and enable the sharing of multiple knowledge systems.
Substantive structural reform of our Australian federal system to a two, alternative three or a four tiered federal system is inevitably a long term agenda. Any decision for such reform however must recognise the interconnectedness of social and natural systems and involve consideration of all sectoral policy arenas concurrently (i.e. health, education, economic development, infrastructure, environment, etc.) to more effectively and legitimately enhance the adaptive capacity of society and its related institutions to deal with and shape inevitable change.