Browsing by Department "Australian Centre For Agriculture and Law"

Forest policy and forestry management in Tasmania have undergone a number of changes in the last thirty years, many explicitly aimed at improving industry sustainability, job security, and forest biodiversity conservation. Yet forestry remains a contentious issue in Tasmania, due to a number of interacting factors, most significant of which is the prevalence of a 'command and control' governance approach by policymakers and managers. New approaches such as multiple-stakeholder decision-making, adaptive management, and direct public participation in policymaking are needed. Such an approach has been attempted in Canada in the last decade, through the Canadian Model Forest Program and may be suitable for Tasmania. This article seeks to describe what the Canadian Model Forest approach is, how it may be implemented in Tasmania, and what role it may play in the shift to a new forestry paradigm. Until such a paradigm shift occurs contentions and confrontations are likely to continue.

The management of environmental water resources continues to be a highly complex and uncertain field of natural resource management. As a result, there may be significant gaps in shared understanding of issues that are critical to decision-making. This article reports on a facilitation process leading to improved management guidelines for an Environmental Contingency Allowance in the Gwydir Valley, NSW, with an intentional focus on the communication of complex and uncertain management issues and on the integration of local non-specialist knowledge in analysis. The article includes a review of the methodological foundations of the facilitation process, including organisational learning, action research, applied systems theory and decision-support system modelling. The facilitation process includes development of a computer model which departs in some respects from a conventional decision-support system. In view of these differences and their epistemological foundation, the computer model and facilitation process are referred to jointly as a Learning Support System.