Landscapes Shaped by People and Place Institutions Require a New Conservation Agenda

Formal protected area systems will always be insufficient to sustain biodiversity and ecosystem processes. The largest proportions of endangered ecosystems and rare species remain outside public conservation areas on private land, and the political and financial costs of strategic acquisitions of these areas for conservation estate are becoming unaffordable. Although biologists quite rightly continue to call for development of more comprehensive and representative reserve networks, the reality is that the coverage, connectivity, and size of protected areas will remain inadequate (Shaffer et al. 2002). Many authors and participants, as well as the conclusions, of the very comprehensive 30-year review of the Endangered Species Act (Scott et al. 2006) noted the continuing challenge and urgency of extending the conservation agenda more comprehensively across natural and working landscapes (matrix lands), most of which will remain outside any formal reserve system. New integrative approaches are needed

Landscape Loopholes: Moments for Change

Social-ecological systems are breaking down at local, regional, and global scales, and sustainability seems an increasingly distant aspiration. Social harmony and economic systems are connected to ecological systems and climate, in multiple complex ways, at many scales. Adapting research practice to match integration opportunities within social-ecological systems could contribute foresight capabilities emerging from landscape change studies, which can be coupled with emerging policy transformation opportunities. The shaping of landscapes by human imagination and physical action creates meaningful contexts for building sustainability. However, the policy landscape is often dominated by circularity and “lock-in” to unsustainable pathways that are hard to escape. Moments for change emerge through timely convergence of circumstances, within a landscape context, that provide a window of opportunity—a “landscape loophole”—through which the transformation to more sustainable social-ecological relationships might be achieved. Creating future options redundancy (FOR) plans, a variety of possible pathways and alternative landscape futures within the characteristics and capacity of a region, could facilitate policy shifts and adaptive capacity, and reduce risk through reflexive future options. The convergence of circumstances providing loophole opportunities to escape existing lock-in might be understood, and even predicted, by closely coupling landscape sciences and policy research

The 'Commons' Revisited: Learning from the Past for More Resilient Social and Ecological Communities in the Future

The collapse of the natural resource base can in part be seen as the result of the inherited European system. However it is possible to achieve efficient and sustaining systems, leading to better outcomes, as is shown in southern England, as well as on a tableland in the high country of northern New South Wales. The core of the project there, as elsewhere, indicates that better results, the possibility of eco-tourism, and 'a real sense of community' are all possible and invaluable consequences of CPR, the open access as developed in a common property management system (CPRM)

Ecological Restoration across Landscapes of Politics, Policy, and Property

Humanity - society and its institutions - plays a key role in the future viability of the biosphere. Only by managing ourselves, our resource consumption, our waste, our economies and environment as a whole, can we hope to "manage" the environment and its abundant resources toward a sustainable, healthy, and restorative future. Unfortunately, political reelections and the politics of environmental restoration often seem to be at juxtapositions. The fast-moving variables of economics and reelection generally reign supreme over their slower, foundational, and interdependent ecological components (Carpenter and Turner 2001). The scales of time and space and the constituency of voters generally don't line up, and, as a result, political and ecological concerns are often misinterpreted as rivals rather than essentials. Similarly, planning for the development of land and other resource use often conflicts with maintaining ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation , and ecological restoration requirements. To make matters more confusing, the policies and programs of different government agencies appear to contradict each other. In this chapter, I offer a "big picture" view of politics, policy, and property (the "3Ps") as they relate to ecological restoration based on a brief discussion of theory and practice stemming from the fields of regional landscape ecology, complex systems, and institutional design

Using context in novel community-based natural resource management: landscapes of property, policy and place

Community based natural resource management (CBNRM) engages groups of citizens in collective action towards sustainable conservation and natural resource management (NRM) within and across various tenure regimes. Substantial differences exist between developing and developed countries in terms of conditions conducive to CBNRM. There are also contextual differences from national to local scales, across different 'spaces' and 'places' within each. This paper focuses on developed countries in deriving and synthesizing some concepts from systems theory and landscape ecology, with lessons from facilitating novel CBNRM arrangements. Understanding the landscape context of interacting levels and scales of social and ecological systems can inform institutional development of resilient CBNRM. Efforts to increase the scale and effectiveness of social-ecological sustainability can benefit from novel arrangements facilitating holistic integration of environmental conservation across levels of institutions of communities and government, including tenure regimes (type and ownership of resources as 'property'). Property and policy, together with 'place' attachment of communities can be viewed within a landscape framework. Such a 'landscape lens' provides an interdisciplinary meld that is important to sustainable CBNRM, but sometimes forgotten (or avoided) in government planning, policy deliberation and action

Turning points towards sustainability: integrative science and policy for novel (but real) landscape futures

Non-metropolitan landscapes are the major theatre of interactions where large-scale alteration occurs precipitated by local to global forces of economic, social and environmental change. However, these regional landscape effects are critical also to local natural resource and social sustainability, ecosystem health through to larger scales of biospheric functioning. The institutions contributing pressures and responses consequently shape future landscapes and in turn influence how social systems, resource users, governments and policy makers perceive those landscapes and their future. These are, in essence, complex social-ecological systems intertwined in a multitude of ways at many spatial scales across time. Over time, the cycles of complex social-ecological systems also reach crossroads, which might be crisis points at which future options are no longer available (possibly because of resource degradation or loss), or turning points where opportunities arise when it is easier to change direction towards more sustainable activities. This paper provides some examples of interdisciplinary research that has provided a holistic integration through close engagement with residents and communities or through deliberately implementing integrative high-risk on-ground experimental models to learn by doing. In the final analysis, each project has characteristically, however, sought to integrate through spatial (if not temporal) synthesis, policy analysis and (new or changed) institutional arrangements that are relevant locally and corporately, as well as at broader levels of government and geography. This has provided transferable outcomes that can contribute real options and adaptive capacity for suitable positive futures

On common ground: designing strategic spatial governance to advance integrated natural resource management and environmental outcomes

Despite a growing body of theory that emphasises the importance of sociospatial 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 artefacts. The confluence of these trends suggests that 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 combined with institutional theory and political science suggests that joining forces to take responsibility for collective action towards sustainability is more likely within particular social-ecological contexts and scales

'Sea-Change' and Landscape Change: A spatial examination of trend and alternative landscape futures for the Northern Rivers Region of New South Wales, Australia

Throughout the world landscapes have been modified over time to meet the needs of humans. Although change is normal for all systems, this reshaping of landscapes and regions to meet our urban, agricultural and industrial needs has changed the structure and function of ecosystems at local and regional scales (Norton & Ulanowicz 1992; Power 1996; Essex and Brown 1997; Turner et al. 2001). While the interaction of social and ecological systems produced new desirable properties for humanity, the modification of a landscape structure and composition affects key ecological processes that govern the movement and low of energy, nutrients, water and biota (Forman & Godron 1986; O'Neill & Ritters 1999). The type, extent and rate of changes caused by these interactions can subsequently over-stress interdependent systems leading to a loss in ecosystem function, services and amenity (Johnson et al. 1999; Herce et al. 2003; Gunderson & Honing 2002; Brunckhorst 2000, 2005