Natural resources management arrangements in the Lake Eyre Basin: An enabling environment for community engagement?

Abstract

An overview of the formal institutional arrangements for natural resource management (NRM) in the Lake Eyre Basin (LEB) and the role of these arrangements as an enabling environment for community engagement in NRM constitute our broad research focus. The appropriate scale of NRM management and the complexity and expense of effective community engagement are discussed. The research highlights challenges faced by NRM groups in remote regions and their need for proper support and sharing in significant decision making processes. Regional interface groups are presented as relatively recent experiments in ecological intervention within a rapidly changing policy environment. The study concludes with a summary of key challenges for NRM engagement in the LEB region and suggests that interface organisations require understanding, capacity and support to learn how to improve, adapt and meet the challenges of their operating environment.