Election 2016: how well are the major parties meeting the needs of rural and regional Australia?

[Extract] How far do policies announced during the 2016 federal election campaign go towards addressing key policy issues for non-metropolitan Australia

Profit, risk and stability: decision making criteria for sustainable cropping

For some time now there has been a growing trend in cropping areas towards the use of so-called 'alternative' crops. Nevertheless, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS 1989) has reported that the area of land under crop on the central and southern slopes of NSW sown to broadleaf varieties in 1988 was still quite low at only 6 percent. Agronomists from the NSW Department of Agriculture believed that an expansion in the area sown to broadleaf crops would dramatically improve the productivity of farms in the area (Mead, 1992). A joint project was initiated involving NSW Agriculture and the Centre for Rural Social Research to investigate the use of broadleaf based crop rotations and barriers to their further adoption. Researchers from the Centre for Rural Social Research conducted six focus group discussions and 180 random sample interviews, in the agronomy districts of Albury, Cootamundra, Cowra, Temora, Wagga Wagga and Young

Election 2016: the issues in non-metropolitan Australia

[Extract] Rural and regional Australia is a big place. That's obvious enough. Still, it's easy to forget that the communities and industries of non-metropolitan Australia are diverse. They face a variety of challenges and often have different, if not competing, stakes in government policy. But what are the issues that deserve attention leading up to the 2016 federal election? While not everyone living in rural and regional Australia will see eye-to-eye on how these issues should be resolved, I will return to this list closer to election day to see just how many have made their way onto the national political agenda

Risk and Social Theory in Environmental Management

Risk and Social Theory in Environmental Management marks a timely contribution, given that environmental management is no longer just about protecting pristine ecosystems and endangered species from anthropogenic harm; it is about calculating and managing the risks to human communities of rapid environmental and technological change. Firstly, the book provides a solid foundation of the social theory underpinning the nature of risk, then presents a re-thinking of key concepts and methods in order to take more seriously the biophysical embeddedness of human society. Secondly, it presents a rich set of case studies from Australia and around the world, drawing on the latest applied research conducted by leading research institutions. In so doing, the book identifies the tensions that arise from decision-making over risk and uncertainty in a contested policy environment, and provides crucial insights for addressing on-ground problems in an integrated way

Renegotiating gender and the symbolic transformation of Australian rural environments

A notable feature of contemporary approaches to ameliorating rural environmental degradation (such as Australia’s National Landcare Program) is the involvement of women to a degree not witnessed in other mainstream farming issues and organisations. At the same time, rural women’s networks are calling for greater recognition of the contribution women make to agriculture and rural communities – to recognise women as ‘farmers’ in their own right – and for a broadening of the agri-political agenda to give greater recognition to non-‘ production’ issues such as social services, workplace health and safety and environmental care. Given the traditional construction of agricultural labour processes in highly masculinised and phallocentric terms, this raises a number of questions regarding the degree to which rural environments are undergoing a sort of symbolic transformation. More specifically, we might question the degree to which these developments provide evidence that human relationships with rural environments – as embodied in the labour process and other day-to-day activities – are being reconceptualised and restructured. To explore this question, we explore data from a variety of sources including ethnographic research conducted with community Landcare groups and organic farmers, and textual analysis of the popular rural press. We conclude that while the renegotiation of gender relations in the labour process is in itself culturally and socially profound, a range of other sociocultural processes may stand in the way of fundamental transformation of the relationships with rural environments implied in those labour processes

Critical Landcare

This collection of papers analyses the sociological context of landcare and ways of evaluating and facilitating landcare. Topics discussed include rural gender relations and landcare, and sustainability and change

Engaged Environmental Citizenship

The topic of this book, engaged environmental citizenship, is a 'big idea'. It raises many issues about democracy; governance; consumer society; how people, their environments and ecology are connected; and how we can take better account of ecological realities and minimise environmental impacts. Environmental and natural resource issues need to be addressed at a range of scales and by many different people. They can seldom be solved without concerted, coordinated and cooperative action. Some people who become involved do so in a professional capacity. Others are involved because of the citizenship obligations they feel and their care for the common good. Many government programs rely on the voluntary expression of environmental or corporate citizenship, as do community-based environmental movements. What then do we mean by 'environmental citizens'? How and why do people and organisations become these kinds of citizens? How can they engage with critical environmental issues and make a difference? What gets in their way? These are the kinds of questions this book addresses

Rurality bites: The social and environmental transformation of rural Australia

Current agricultural and rural policy in Australia, among governments and major industry groups alike, is a recipe for continued rural decline and the increasing dominance of agriculture by global agribusiness. Indeed, so is a retreat to the past. Rurality Bites is the first comprehensive book on the social and environmental transformation sweeping rural Australia at the beginning of the 21st century. Rurality Bites proposes that the society of the future in rural Australia is an increasingly knowledge intensive one and the concerns, issues and identities of these Australians must be addressed if a positive future is to be realised. In this book, it is apparent that the seeds of a new apprach - one that acknowledges the increasingly globalised context for all activity, but also builds social and natural capital locally - have already been sown. The issue now is to nurture them and ensure that they allow for new enterprises, forms of knowledge, types of community service and forms of governance to develop, and evolve, in the face of ever shifting circumstances

Markets and the crowding out of conservation-relevant behavior

Markets are increasingly being incorporated into many aspects of daily life and are becoming an important part of the conservation solution space. Although market-based solutions to environmental problems can result in improvements to conservation, a body of social science research highlights how markets may also have unforeseen consequences by crowding out or displacing 3 key types of behaviors potentially relevant to conservation, including people's willingness to engage in collective action and civic duty; tolerance for inflicting harm on others (third-party externalities); and desire for equity. Better understanding of the contexts and mechanisms through which this crowding out occurs and whether specific market-based instruments are more prone to different types of crowding out will be crucial to developing novel conservation initiatives that can reduce or prevent crowding out

Reconsidering Women's Work in Rural India: Analysis of NSSO Data, 2004-05 and 2011-12

The most recent data gathered by the National Sample Survey Office on work participation for women in India reveal a sharp decline, primarily due to the NSSO's conventional measures not accounting for economic activities undertaken by women for the benefit of households. Alternative definitional approaches to the production boundary, such as the Indian System of National Accounts and the United Nations System of National Accounts, somewhat better account for unpaid work by women for households' own consumption. An analysis of data from the part of the NSSO schedule on employment and unemployment (for 2004-05 and 2011-12) that enquires about various activities undertaken by individuals who report performing household activities as their principal activity, reveals a less dramatic decline than that presented by the more conventional measure of work participation. This finding contributes to a significant rethinking of how rural women's contributions to economic activities for their own households can be better recognised through data