24 October 2009 – for immediate release
A new study from DKCRC recommends sweeping changes in the
management of water and other key resources and in the structure of
institutions responsible for them.
“Let the locals lead – they know what is best.
You could say that sums it up,” says CSIRO’s Dr Alex
Smajgl, a leader of the DKCRC team that prepared the study
“Outback Institutions – an application of the
Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to four case
studies in Australia’s outback”.
The study covered four Outback regions: the Etheridge and
Diamantina Shires in Queensland and the Daly River region and Alice
Springs water resources planning in the NT. It found that the
unique local situation facing each of these regions, driven by the
variable desert climate, argues for greater empowerment and better
support for local people in making their own decisions.
“The Australian outback is a unique ecological and social
landscape,” the study says. “The people who live here
cope with harsh and variable environmental conditions, particularly
in terms of rainfall and the availability of surface water. The
human population density is very low – less than 0.001 people
per km2 – which is considerably less than the
national average of 2.6 people per km2. This population
is widely dispersed around small urban centres that are remote from
major Australian cities.
“Environmental drivers are dominated by the availability
of water, with ‘droughts and flooding rains’ likely to
remain a central feature of life in outback regions of Australia.
Water supply for human or ecosystem use across this region is
determined by the highly variable rainfall and very high
evaporation rates relative to rainfall.
“Water issues are very different between coastal and
interior outback regions, including in the regions in this study.
Along the coastal and semi-arid region surface water flows are more
reliable; in the interior they are highly episodic and hence
unreliable. In the interior, water bores are vitally important
sources of reliable water necessary to support human populations
and their production systems. These harsh environmental factors
frame all human activities in these regions.”
Faced with such limitations, remote bureaucracies in coastal
capitals cannot be expected to grasp the detail of situations
affecting local communities spread over thousands of square
kilometres of the inland.
At the same time the sheer size of some of these desert regions
means they sometimes fall under many overlapping federal, state and
local jurisdictions, creating a governmental maze which perplexes
and exhausts those trying to navigate it.
The report’s recommendations centre on eight key
areas:
- changing desert institutions by devolving centralised power to
them
- improving the capacity of local people to lead and
participate
- improving the transparency of the decision-making process
- improving its fairness
- ensuring ways to manage conflict are in place
- improving the accessibility of information
- giving greater recognition to the local context
- establishing effective monitoring.
“Primarily we found that devolving power downwards can
improve decision-making outcomes under the challenging conditions
of the Outback,” Dr Smajgl says.
“There need to be well-defined resource boundaries, based
on real science, to let people know what they should be doing to
manage the resources well.
“Also, there needs to be a lot more transparency about who
is in charge, what they are doing and the extent of their
powers.”
The report also places strong emphasis on capacity building
– training up local leaders to take charge of these new
responsibilities and to acknowledge all the different interests
that come into play when resources like water and land use are
under debate. Where conflicts arise, there need to be effective
mechanisms to manage them.
It urges greater recognition of local knowledge and a more
helpful stance in providing information by state agencies.
And it commends ways of monitoring the performance of local
institutions that tell the desert community how well they are
performing, ensure genuine outcomes in land, water and
environmental management and also enable state and federal bodies
to see what is going on.
The study can be found at:
http://www.desertknowledgecrc.com.au/publications/downloads/DKCRC-Report-31-Outback-Institutions_Application-of-the-IAD-framework.pdf
More information:
Dr Alex Smajgl, DKCRC and CSIRO, ph 07 4753 8615 or mobile 0419
793439
Jan Ferguson, Managing Director, DKCRC, 08 8959 6041 or 0401 719
882
Prof. Julian Cribb, DKCRC media, 0418 639 245
http://www.desertknowledgecrc.com.au/news/media.html
