Browsing by Author "Brunckhorst, David"

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Bounding Resource Governance for Collective Action Across Multi- functional Regions: A Cross-Scale Eco-Civic Regionalisation Method
(2008) Brunckhorst, David; Reeve, Ian
"Despite a growing body of theory that emphasizes the importance of socio-spatial aspects in the representation of community interests, regionalisation for natural resource governance remains dominated by river catchments. At the same time, across many nations, local governments are being given increasing responsibilities for environmental and resource management, but work within boundaries that are largely historical artifacts. The confluence of these trends suggests it is timely to examine the requirements for spatial definition of resource governance regions. A considerable body of research on place attachment, social networks, and participatory resource management combines to suggest that joining forces to take responsibility for collective action towards sustainability is more likely within particular social-ecological contexts and scales. We suggest three essential principles to guide the definition of boundaries of more efficient and effective regional contexts for collective engagement in natural resource planning, governance and actions. First, the nature and reach of environmental externalities of resource use should determine the size and nesting of resource management regions. Second, the boundaries of resource governance regions should enclose areas of greatest interest and importance to local residents. Third, the biophysical characteristics of a resource governance region should be as homogenous as possible. We applied these principles to the derivation of an eco-civic, resource governance regionalisation for the Australian state of New South Wales. This paper describes these concepts, the results and their potential policy application. An important finding was that many administrative and resource governance regions fall short on a regionalisation performance measure developed to gauge the fragmentation of representation of community interests. Such fragmentation of individuals collective shared interests as communities reduces participation and effectiveness of planning, creates loggerheads and increased transaction costs. Potential institutional (re-) design is likely to be more effective given the spatially nested common grounds provided by the ecocivic regionalization technique."
Building Capital through Bioregional Planning and Biosphere Reserves
(2001) Brunckhorst, David
"The need to implement innovative approaches to sustainability is now more critical than ever. This discussion draws on parts of the puzzle that must be assembled to achieve integrated, cross-tenure and jurisdictional management of whole regions and their peoples for a sustainable future. A regional, landscape ecology approach helps us to move on from theory and historical lessons to boldly design and adaptively develop novel on-ground models. To take an entirely different approach from conventional thinking, I draw from Common Property Resource (CPR) theory and experience, together with practical experience from the Bookmark Biosphere project. The characteristics of successful enduring Common Property regimes are identified and discussed in light of critical needs to maintain and restore social and ecological capital. I then highlight the concepts and logistical objectives behind the 30-year-old UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Program, which appears to have great potential as an operational framework within which these changes can be made."
Creating Contemporary Commons to Enhance Economic Productivity: A Grazing Commons in Rural Australia
(2000) Coop, Phillip; Brunckhorst, David
"The loss of ecological function across landscapes and whole regions is clearly a global priority, not only because of the direct impacts on biodiversity and the processes it sustains but also the social consequences arising in communities whose very existence is dependent on this natural capital. Conventional attempts to address these issues invariably fail to capture appropriators wholes and are hampered through; narrowly focused programmes, entrenched property rights, institutional impediments, economic incentives and inappropriate spatial and temporal scales. "The enduring resource systems of Common Property Resources (CPR), collectively managed appear to contribute ecological and social resilience within an external context of high risk and uncertainty. The sustaining vigour of successful common property regimes (CPR) has provided the interface through which the demands placed on the natural environment by these communities were more closely matched to the broader scale natural processes that supplied these environmental goods and services, both spatially and temporally. We need to revisit these institutional forms and determine, through application, if these social organisational arrangements are socially and ecologically robust, to deliver sustainable rural futures. "A critical step in this endeavor and one of the greatest challenges facing researchers undertaking this type of study is to strategically commence adoption of CPR concepts utilising the experience gained by institutional and political theorists and applying them to on-ground scenarios, in a variety of contexts including those in western federated nations. Once demonstrated through application, the CPR approach, with its unique qualities of flexibility, collaboration and scale, may evolve into a powerful tool capable of addressing critical issues that have to date evaded the institutional constraints of conventional paradigms. "This paper outlines the early development of one such model and details the efforts of a group of graziers in Australia who are developing a contemporary CPR from private parcels of land in an attempt to address the degradational spiral that continues to challenge them, and their rural counterparts worldwide."
Designing Robust Common Property Regimes for Collaboration Towards Rural Sustainability
(Earthscan, 2007) Brunckhorst, David; Marshall, Graham R.
"The 'outback' of Australia represents a large part of the continent, and is characterised in large part by rangelands -- arid and semi-arid landscapes with occasional monsoon-like rains and low productivity soils used primarily for grazing. These social-ecological systems can be differentiated as particular biocultural or landscape region, such as the northern savanna. Despite the sometimes large distances between neighbours, these are interdependent systems with external influences, including those of distant governments. In understanding, facilitating, or possibly re-designing institutional arrangements for collective action and resource governance in the outback, knowledge by local people of the design characteristics of robust community-scale institutions will be important. Appropriate business structures might offer a supportive framework for collective decisions that facilitate adaptive management enhancing sustainability and endurance. "After summarising the characteristics of enduring common property regimes, we draw on three projects we have been closely involved with to describe how legal entities or corporate structures might be employed to enhance robustness of the institutional arrangements. All are Australian grazing systems, one in the Mallee rangelands and Riverland in South Australia, and two on the relatively richer soils of the New England Tablelands of New South Wales. Each example involves the development of a form of common property regime for collective decision-making, action and governance of landholder groups and/or communities. Facilitating and supporting (but not stifling) this institutional development through legal entities or corporate structures can contribute robustness. Balancing individual versus collective rationale, and risk management of internal and external stresses enhances robust capabilities. Some corporate structures or combinations of entities might, in different ways, be useful in the development and evolution of robust institutional arrangements for collective use and governance of various resources across multiple scales of ownership. "Anderies and co-authors differentiated resilience, which arises from spontaneous self-organising processes within a system (such as an ecosystem or a social network), from robustness that arises in addition from conscious efforts to increase a system's capacity to adapt to internal and external stresses. The more we understand how to facilitate robustness in linked social-ecological systems, the better equipped we become to design institutional arrangements capable of enhancing the resilience of those ecosystems we depend on (Anderies et al., 2004). The on-ground experiments discussed in this chapter seek particularly to understand how groups of farmers can move towards sustainable natural resource management and enterprise development by crafting institutional arrangements enabling them to manage their combined resources cooperatively. Such arrangements can contribute both resilience and robustness. In building robustness, we are particularly interested here in how to take advantage of opportunities the existing suite of business structures (supported by a state's legal system) might contribute to robustness of common property regimes."
'Eco-civic' Optimisation: A Nested Framework for Planning and Managing Landscapes
(2006) Brunckhorst, David; Coop, Phillip; Reeve, Ian
"An important institution for regional resource governance is civic engagement in local affairs, including resource use issues. Local civic engagement has traditionally been structured around local government and, more recently, to catchment-based decision-making bodies. If citizens are to participate in regional resource management in ways that are meaningful to them, it is important that both the landscape units being discussed and the jurisdictional boundaries are meaningful. We have been examining how boundaries for resource management regions might be identified. Three considerations are believed to be important if regional resource management is to be meaningful to the citizens involved. Firstly, that the regional boundaries maximize the areal proportion of the region that residents consider to be part of their 'community,' which should lead to greater commitment to civic engagement in resource management. Secondly, that the character of the landscape units within the region possess a high degree of homogeneity, reflecting greater coincidence of interest among the inhabitants of the region. The third consideration is a hierarchical multi-scaling capacity to deal with externalities of resource use. The approach was tested through identification of a series of nested 'eco-civic' resource management regions for north-eastern New South Wales in Australia. The results delineate resource governance regions that nest at local to regional scales for integrated natural resource management. Such 'eco-civic' regions demonstrate a better spatial representation of social and ecological characteristics than existing regional frameworks."
Exploring New Approaches to Community Governance
(2008) Brunckhorst, David
"'Commons' researchers, historical experience and literature have a lot to offer the considerable challenge of global resource management and environmental degradation. Researchers and policy makers not only need a more seamless dialogue and understanding, we also need to be willing to be bold and innovative in using the available knowledge to address community governance issues in operational and practical ways. In turn, these become 'learning laboratories' building new, practical knowledge and adaptive capacity. "This Commons Forum is, hopefully, a conversation piece aimed at stimulating thoughts and discussion. I must declare up front however, where I am coming from -- my biases. As a landscape ecologist interested in resource governance issues and therefore society, community and collaborative mechanisms, I am interested in innovation and knowledge building towards 'integrative' resource governance that build resilience and sustainability capacity within and across landscapes and regions."
Geography of Place: Principles and Application for Defining 'Eco-civic' Resource Governance Regions
(2006) Brunckhorst, David; Reeve, Ian
"River catchments have been the dominant form of regionalisation for natural-resource management in many countries since the 1980s. Local governments play a considerable role in planning with ever-increasing responsibilities for sustainable environmental management, planning and development controls. There has also been an increasing emphasis on community participation in resource management, which emphasises the need to re-examine the requirements for spatial definition of resource governance regions. This paper proposes three principles. First, the nature and reach of environmental externalities of resource use should determine the size and nesting of resource management regions. Second, the boundaries of resource governance regions should enclose areas of greatest interest and importance to local residents. Third, the biophysical characteristics of a resource governance region should be as homogenous as possible, which provides resource planning and management efficiencies. The paper describes a range of concepts and empirical techniques used to apply these principles to the derivation of a resource governance regionalisation of the State of New South Wales, Australia."
Spatially Bounded Regions for Resource Governance
(2007) Reeve, Ian; Brunckhorst, David
"Despite a growing body of theory that emphasises the importance of socio-spatial aspects in the representation of community interests, regionalisation for natural resource governance remains dominated by river catchments. At the same time, Australian local governments are being given increasing responsibilities for environmental and resource management, but work within boundaries that are largely historical artefacts. The confluence of these trends suggests it is timely to examine the requirements for spatial definition of resource governance regions. We contend that there are three essential requirements for efficient and effective natural resource planning and governance. First, the nature and reach of environmental externalities of resource use should determine the size and nesting of resource management regions. Second, the boundaries of resource governance regions should enclose areas of greatest interest and importance to local residents. Third, the biophysical characteristics of a resource governance region should be as homogenous as possible. We applied these principles to the derivation of an eco-civic, resource governance regionalisation for New South Wales. This article describes the concepts needed for this work, the results and their potential policy application. An important finding was that many regionalisations in use in New South Wales fall short on a regionalisation performance measure developed to gauge the fragmentation of representation of community interests."
Synergies for Social, Ecological, and Economic Recovery on Newly- Created Commons
(2000) Brunckhorst, David
"This discussion draws on a variety of parts of a puzzle and assembles a different perspective for development of future Common Property Resource regimes. From this landscape ecologist's point of view, we must urgently move on from theory and historical lessons to boldly design and adaptively or experimentally develop New Commons (common property resource management institutions) as potential long-term solutions to restoration and future sustainability of rapidly degrading environments. Without repeating theory or concepts that are well known to institutional analysts and political scientists studying Common Pool Resources, I attempt to draw together the identified characteristics of successful enduring Common Property regimes with the needs for maintaining and restoring social and ecological capital, especially in rural areas. I then highlight the concepts and logistical objectives behind the 30 year old UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Program, which appears to have great potential as an operational framework within which to design and assemble new commons as experimental models. The novel arrangements, experience, and lessons from one such model--the Bookmark Biosphere project in South Australia-- are described as an example."