Get into your tutorial groups around one of the white boards

1. Get into your tutorial groups around one of the white boards • Jot down on either side of the board a few issues that you think the government should definitely control and things they should never control • In the middle try to identify some “borderline” human-environment issues that governments might need to become involved in under certain circumstances

2. Second task • Focus on a couple of “borderline” human-environment issues and see if you agree on the circumstances for government involvement • Explore the range of views in your group over this issue • Be prepared to report back on the implications of your differences of opinions for environmental policy and planning.

3. Week 5 Lecture outline • RB on EPP lessons from Landcare • After break facilitators to report back on Public Participation and Greening of Business Tutorials - very brief <1 minute feedback from one facilitators per tutorial • If time PK on sustainability and policy (otherwise next week)

4. Important messages • Could anyone who is not getting emails from me come and see me at the half time break • Tut paper questions are on your webpage - Public Participation one is “What are the keys to effective public participation in an environmental context?” It is due next week in your tuts - see link at top of http://fennerschool-people.anu.edu.au/richard_baker/SRES3028/lectures_and_tutorials.html for all questions and dates

5. Landcare policy • History of land degradation in Australia • Failure of technical fixes • What is Landcare • History of Landcare • What has Landcare achieved • Emerging Landcare dilemmas • Characteristics of a learning society

6. Why look at Landcare • a case study of community participation in resource management and of the importance of social capital • being heralded around the world as Australia’s great contribution to “managing the commons” • has been exported to New Zealand, the Philippines and South Africa, and is also being investigated by Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia to name a few. • Key part of the move towards regional planning approaches in Australia - topic of final tutorials

7. Crucial time for Landcare • Landcare groups have successfully raised awareness of land degradation issues through demonstration days, trial plots and the like. Some have done their farm planning, catchment planning, and are now embarking on ambitious regional planning exercises. There is however growing frustration among Landcare members because while they have identified what now needs to be done to address land degradation they do not have the resources to carry out these actions.

8. New Government Policy • “Caring for Our Country provides $2.25 billion in funding over five years from 1 July 2008 to June 2013. It will integrate a number of existing natural resource management measures into a consolidated program. These include the Natural Heritage Trust, the National Landcare Program, the Environmental Stewardship Program, and elements of the Working on Country program.” • http://nrm.gov.au/funding/future.html

9. The program includes funds to implement election commitments to: • rescue the Great Barrier Reef; • repair our fragile coastal ecosystems; • save the endangered Tasmanian Devil; • improve water quality in the Gippsland Lakes; • fight the Cane Toad menace; • employ additional Indigenous Rangers; • expand the Indigenous Protected Area network; and • assist Indigenous Australians enter the carbon trading market.

10. Landcare - a good case study to explore the barriers to this community participation • Landcare offers a radical model of community empowerment and involvement in resource management that could be applied to many other environmental issues • But lots of problems in Landcare • and we can learn from them, one particularly thorny issue is that of who pays, asking this question raises lots of important issues for this course • handing back money stories from Braidwood, majority of work so far on public land

11. Land Degradation in Australia has huge ecological, financial and social costs • Conacher and Conacher 2001 estimate costs annually over $2b in terms of restoration works and $1.2b in lost production

12. Long history in Australia of land degradation • 1889 major problems with drifting sand led in WA led to the legislating of the Sand Drift Act, had little impact and concern was such about land degradation in WA that in 1901 a Royal Commission was established to look into land degradation of the states rangelands

13. History of land degradation • similar severe erosion problems of the late 1920s and early 1930s led to growing community concern and eventually led to the NSW Govt establishing in 1938 the Soil Conservation Service • Recurring pattern of public policy responses to such problems being after the event attempts to address symptoms rather than causes of this degradation • Landcare importantly is potentially a preventive rather than reactive policy approach

14. Proportion of land requiring treatment for soil degradation in 1975 • Source State of the Environment in Australia: Source book,1986 Department Arts, Heritage and environment

15. Government policies have played a major role in creating these problems Government policies of the many decades have encouraged land degradation. Tax concessions for clearing native vegetation; drought assistance schemes; closer settlement schemes; inappropriate subdivision of land; ill-conceived badly designed and poorly managed irrigation schemes – all are examples of policy driven constraints to sustainability. Andrew Campbell 1992 National Landcare Facilitator’s Finals Report See Andrew’s lecture to first year class - Google Richard Baker ANU to get to http://fennerschool-people.anu.edu.au/richard_baker/

16. As social scientists working in developing countries have long pointed out land degradation is as much about ‘social processes as physical ones’ Blaikie, 1985:50 The Political economy of soil erosion in developing countries, Longman.

17. The technical scientific model of addressing land degradation has clearly failed • The current extent of land degradation in Australia highlights that the technical scientific model of addressing land degradation has clearly failed. • The main reasons this approach has not worked is that it has ignored so many of the cultural factors that need to be addressed.

18. Landcare’s potential Landcare has enormous potential to address the land degradation crisis because it addresses many of these social processes. It is based on the principle of individual and group ownership of land degradation. This is a recognition of the fact that the necessary remedies will not materialise unless landowners are committed to ensuring that they occur.

19. What is landcare • local community action to repair land degradation • a grass roots voluntary movement at the brown end of the green spectrum • a group extension program (as opposed to traditional government based extension programs eg soil con) • a framework for delivery of government funds and technical aid • a way for the state to shift responsibility for land degradation to the community level (part of economic irrationalism, govt getting out of everything it can) • a strategic approach to land conservation issues demanding cooperation at scales greater than the individual property

20. What is Landcare cont. • an awareness raising organisation • a means of enhancing farmer to farmer communication • a forum for local people to discuss, learn about and act upon issues of common concern • an outlet for land users keen to improve land management • a social focus for sharing the stresses of rural decline • a greenie or govt plot egs of both from Braidwood • is all of the above

21. History of Landcare • Community based Landcare groups started to form in the early to mid 1980s in response to local environmental problems, primarily, but not exclusively, in Victoria and Western Australia. • In Victoria Land Care (two words as it is still often spelt in Victoria) groups tended to grow out of pre-existing Farm Tree Groups and in Western Australia they evolved out of Land Conservation District Committees (Campbell and Seipen, 1994: 24-29).

22. Unholy alliance • Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the National Farmers’ Federation (NFF). • conceived in the parliamentary bar • birth harder work • bringing up a child is harder still • Wilful teenage stage

23. Politics of getting landcare up • As in most successful political lobbying, the timing of the ACF-NFF submission was crucial to its success. A number of critical factors came into alignment in the lead up to the 1990 Federal Election. • involved waiting until a less sympathetic senior minister went overseas and getting the ear of junior minister and getting him to take a submission straight to cabinet

24. Politics of getting landcare up • Of particular importance was the fact that the proposal was attractive to both consensus driven Prime Minster Hawke and to the Federal Minister for Primary Industry, John Kerin - trained as a geographer and interested in land degradation (see Kerin, 1987:1-4) • Kerin, J., 1987: Land degradation and government, in A. Chisholm and R. Dumsday (eds), Land Degradation: Problems and Policies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1-4. .

25. Built upon existing community projects and government policy • National Soil Conservation Program - annual funding of only about $4m a year - A figure that was about the same as the budget for landscaping the new Parliament House. • Existing community groups – predated the 1989 policy initiative

26. Huge growth in landcare groups

27. What motivates landcare groups to form • Major environmental problems • Should be noted that these problems have been created by a combination of bad government policy and inappropriate land uses

28. Role of salinity As Campbell and Seipen, (1994:29) noted it is no coincidence that many early Landcare groups formed in areas with rising saline watertables. ‘When you have a rising tide of salty ground water beneath your farm, it is obvious that: (a) you need to act, and (b) you cannot solve the problem unless other people act, so that cooperative efforts at a catchment or district level are essential.’

31. What do Landcare groups do? • Have a committee which organises activities to raise awareness of issues related to the use of land and water resources. • Issues of concern are diverse and vary from region to region. • They include, weeds, feral animals, water quality, soil erosion, soil structure decline, salinity and rising water tables. • Responses to these issues are equally diverse as a result of local environmental and cultural conditions

32. Diversity of approaches crucial • This diversity of approaches is important given the past tendency of Australian policy makers to ignore “the tremendous diversity of the nation's rural people, communities, and economies” Sher and Sher (1994:3) • as a result inappropriate policies and programs. • eg crop growers and graziers have very different ways of looking at their landscapes as a result of differences in the nature of their farming. • In turn, these different ways of seeing play an important role in determining the outlook of the Landcare groups established by each.

33. Need to connect the social and the biophysical • Landcare must be seen in the context of the current social and environmental crisis facing the Australian bush • Rural Australia is going through a social and environmental crisis and the two feed each other and are intertwined • The financial crisis facing the bush at the moment for example makes it a lot harder for landholders to take environmental actions • “it is hard being green when you are in the red”

34. “Ownership” of problems • Landcare is based on the principle of individual and group ownership of land degradation. This is a recognition of the fact that the necessary remedies will not materialise unless landowners are committed to ensuring that they occur. • Cows in your gully story

35. Problem that you need a problem • People tend not to get their act together until a problem is great • “the biggest problem for our landcare group is that we don’t have a big problem”

36. Buddhist view of this • “Repetition and habit encourage the mind to be sluggish, a shock is needed to awaken it, which we then call a problem. We try to solve this problem according to or well worn explanations, justifications and condemnations, all of which puts the mind back to sleep again” J Krishnamurti 1953 Education and the significance of life, London, Victor Gollanncz

37. Landcare at Walwa

38. Walwa landcare formation • In some cases the problem that is motivating groups to form are not related to environmental problems as such but to the bureaucratic response to these problems. • Walwa area the stimulus for groups to form was not so much a reaction to an environmental crisis but to the perceived waste of money from an uncoordinated response to gully erosion caused by severe storms in 1991. • Locals described how they were horrified by the number of people who came in ‘throwing money at the problem and not talking to us’ • Landcare has been a call for partnerships between govt and communities

39. Partnership • Partnership is a key tenet of Landcare and aptly sums up the relationship that is emerging between innovative field based Government staff and Landcare groups. • These staff often find themselves in radically different roles from those they have trained for. • Former soil conservationists trained in dealing with soils rather than people have found themselves in the role of facilitators

40. Partnerships cont. • a major impediment to partnerships between community Landcare groups and the Landcare bureaucracy in the distrust in rural Australia of ‘the Government’. • Many community Landcare members have a general unease about having anything to do with ‘the Government’ (a term that can encompass politicians and bureaucrats working in both Federal and State Governments) “tell the bastards in Canberra they are idiots”

41. New skills required • To be a group facilitator, for example, need ability to float ideas and to have the humility to stand back to see which ideas (if any) are taken up by Landcare groups • not all staff are coping with these changes. • some are falling back into an ‘I am the expert’ role, and are not giving groups the independence they require to develop a sense of ownership of their problems.

42. Those ready to make the required changes tend to fall into two categories 1) recent graduates exposed to models of adult learning and community participation in planning, or 2) locals with a commitment to the area and an understanding of the social factors that make the community work.

44. Typology of Extension Information Access Group Facilitation Technology Development Knowledge Brokering Programmed Learning Individual Consultant / Mentor

45. Farmer’s have long memories! • Government is seen in rural Australia as remote, inconsistent and is blamed for creating many of the environmental problems that they are now trying to address. • Landholders are very ready to point out as you will hear numerous times if you do the MDB field course the irony of current Government controls on vegetation clearance and policies encouraging tree planting when until very recently perverse taxation concessions existed that encouraged tree clearance.

46. Perverse policies • former rural polices that have contributed to land degradation include fertiliser subsidies that encouraged over application, water pricing mechanisms that encouraged over use, various land use practices have been extended farming beyond their sustainable ecological limits, interventionary commodity pricing polices and inappropriate drought relief measures (Messer, 1987:237).

47. Important to see how Landcare groups see the world • The area covered by any given Landcare group is either based on the local group's sense of where their community stops and starts or is based on a pre-existing organisation from which the group has evolved. • The two are of course often related as sense of community has already shaped existing organisations. • Sense of place often shaped by geography

48. Sense of community • A strong sense of community can often be focused in a small valley and it is no coincidence that many successful Landcare groups are to be found in such areas. • The valley can not be too big or the sense of human connections is lost. • In most areas of Australia, however, geographic features do not so strongly determine local senses of community.

49. Cultural geography of Landcare • The Murray valley, the Riverina or the rangelands are all too big for: • everyone within them to know everyone else and • for people living in them to be able to see the physical extent of these regions. • In such areas cultural boundaries dominate in constructions of place. • Rather than being a river catchment it might be cultural catchment that defines where people feel their region stops. • Examples, include foot-rot districts, bushfire brigade districts, Local Government areas, football team and a tennis club (Carr, 1994:233).

50. Landcare cultural dimension can lead to conflict with catchment approaches • catchment management structures that have been established in all states are by definition biophysically defined. • Attempts to get Landcare and CMCs to work together are likely to be hampered by this fundamental difference. • CMC also generally include ministerial appointees and are seen by more community based landcare groups therefore to have a credibility problem