Catchment-Scale Governance in Northern Australia: A Preliminary Evaluation

Northern Australia covers vast and diverse landscapes comprising largely public and Indigenous tenures. Long-term Aboriginal and pastoral management, isolation and a challenging terrain and climate have shaped a landscape of national, if not international, conservation value. Northern Australia, however, also has a fragile economy, and there is tension amongst Indigenous, economic and conservation interests. Managed poorly, emerging conflicts could damage the real opportunities that each presents, resulting in major land and natural resource-use conflicts or unsustainable development. As healthy governance systems are the key to effective natural resource management (NRM), this paper presents a preliminary exploration of the health of NRM governance across Northern Australia, with a focus on the catchment scale. We analysed three focal catchments; the Fitzroy in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, the Daly in the top end of the Northern Territory and the Gilbert in north-western Queensland. We find that the governance of each catchment has different strengths and weaknesses depending on history and context. Common challenges, however, include shifting national and state/territory policy frameworks, fragmented funding of science and limited consensus building via spatial decision support. From this analysis, we explore potential reforms in catchment governance across this increasingly contested landscape

Integrated cross-realm planning: a decision-makers' perspective

Pursuing development and conservation goals often requires thinking and planning across terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms because many threats and social–ecological processes transcend realm boundaries. Consequently, effective conservation planning must consider the social and ecological links between realms and follow a cross-realm approach to allocate land/water uses and conservation actions to mitigate cross-realm threats and maintain cross-realm ecological processes. Cross-realm planning requires integrating multiple objectives for conservation and development, and assessing the potential co-benefits and trade-offs between them under alternative development scenarios. Despite progress in cross-realm planning theory, few fully-integrated and applied cross-realm plans exist. The gaps between research and implementation are not unique to cross-realm planning, but are accentuated by the complexity of spatial decision-making entailed. Based on a collaborative process including scientists, resource managers and policy-makers, we developed an operational framework for cross realm planning based on up-to-date thinking in conservation science, but offering practical guidance to operationalise real-world planning. Our approach has a strong theoretical basis while addressing the visions and needs of decision-makers. We discuss the foundations and limitations of current approaches in cross-realm planning, describe key requirements to undertake this approach, and present a real-world application of our framework