Landcare Groups Research Articles

The case for expanding the range of subject specialists used in farm planning.

We explored the merit of expanding the range of subject specialists used in farm planning. We document the outcomes for sheep and beef farmers to improve water quality and promote climate change awareness as part of the wider planning process in two community catchment groups (Hurunui District Landcare Group and King Country River Care group). We found that subject specialists added value. A land resource specialist contributed to greater precision and a more detailed description of the farms natural and built capital. This contributed to a more robust analysis and better targeting of the actions in the work programme. The terrestrial ecologist activated the link between the management of indigenous biodiversity and stream health, with resilience to future climate events. The carbon specialist created the link between tree planting and water quality outcomes because of where tree plantings were located on most farms. The carbon specialist also highlighted the option to register existing soil conservation plantings under the emissionstrading scheme, adding a revenue stream. With the subject specialist(s) as part of the wider farm team, environmental concerns are more likely to be integrated into the business plan with mitigation actions better tailored and targeted in the work programme.

Why could regenerative agriculture be a solution? The “Chianti Classico model”

Industrial agriculture delivers cheap food at high cost in terms of degraded land, water resources, biodiversity and rural societies. It exacerbates floods and droughts, and creates enormous greenhouse gas emissions. There is an alternative: regenerative agriculture that mimics natural ecosystems, holding to four rules: no bare soil, no tillage, a diverse crop rotation and a rough landscape that includes woods and wetlands. Subsidising regenerative farming is politically feasible whereas, probably, taxing land degradation is not. Farmers may be encouraged to adopt regenerative farming through small changes to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) whereby farmers could form Landcare Groups which would develop a regenerative farming brand – analogous to a protected name such as Chianti Classico. They could then sell their brand to a regional Sustainable Farming Panel and, if authenticated, it could receive a subsidy under the CAP.

Enlivening popular education in community development: Action research with neighborhood Centres and Landcare groups in Australia

ABSTRACT This article, drawing on an action research project, argues for the revitalized use of two under-utilized practice frameworks for community development in the pursuit of social change. The two frameworks – Participatory Development Practice and the Spiral Model of Community Education – support a citizen-led approach to practice, one that focuses on the relational and dialogical elements of group processes. Starting with stories of citizens’ lived experiences, a structural or community analysis about the root causes of oppression is enabled and supports community action that can be sustained over time. Findings from the action research showed that groups benefitted from foregrounding their own need for social sustainability and that the educational approach of Freire helped them shift from an antagonistic conflict mode to a dialogical or agonistic conflict mode which created confidence to engage in difficult conversations supporting their community development efforts.

Bridging and bonding social capital for sustainable technology adoption, the Landcare program in the resource poor rural town of Claveria, Philippines

The important role of bonding and bridging social capital in technology adoption has been well documented. This holds true in the dissemination of soil conservation technologies in the town of Claveria under the Landcare program. Past studies unanimously attribute high adoption rates to the formation of farmer Landcare groups, which is a form of bonding social capital, and to the provision of human and physical resources through external networks, a form of bridging social capital. After more than 20 years since the project ended in the town, this study unpacks this relationship and illustrates how the two types of social capital are complementary for sustained technology adoption. Data from household surveys, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews illustrate that the training and physical resources provided through external organizations and partnerships greatly contributed to program participation and high adoption rates of technologies. When such external organizations left the town, adoption rates fell and some farmers reverted to their traditional farm practices. These findings contribute to the debate on the complementation of the two types of social capital in sustaining adoption as well as illustrate how the two types relate to each other for sustainable rural development programs.

Interview with Tony Parkes: Landcare meets science

Tony Parkes is the long‐standing dynamo behind Big Scrub Landcare, a rural landholder group bursting with vision and commitment to bring the best science and practice to the task of restoring what was Australia’s largest tract of subtropical rainforest. What has helped this rural Landcare group become strongly linked to science and best practice?

Make It So: Harnessing Technology to Provide Professional Development to Regional Museum Workers

Make It So: Harnessing Technology to Provide Professional Development to Regional Museum Workers

Collaboration and modelling – tools for integration in the Motueka catchment, New Zealand

A conceptual model of integrated catchment management (ICM) is presented in which ICM is defined as a process to achieve both ecosystem resilience and community resilience. It requires not only biophysical knowledge developed by hydrologists and other environmental scientists, but an active partnership with catchment communities and stakeholders to break the 'paradigm lock' described by the UNESCO-HELP programme. This paper reports observations from ICM research in the Motueka HELP demonstration basin in the upper South Island of New Zealand. The Motueka occupies 2 170 km2 of land yet the river effects are felt on the seabed more than 50 km2 off- shore, so the true 'catchment' is larger. A hydrologically temperate mountainous catchment with horticultural, agricultural, plantation forestry and conservation land uses, the Motueka also hosts an internationally recognised brown trout fishery. Land and water management issues driving ICM research include water allocation conflicts between instream and irrigation water uses, impacts on water quality of runoff from intensifying land uses, catchment impacts on coastal productivity and aquacul- ture, and how to manage catchment processes in an integrated way that addresses cumulative effects of development. Collaboration with catchment stakeholders can be viewed as having two primary purposes: • Building knowledge and commitment of resource users towards sustainable resource management (collaborative learning) • Stakeholder involvement in resource management itself (governance). Examples are presented of a Collaborative Learning Group on Sediment learning of their differing perspectives on fine sedi - ment impacts, and a Catchment Landcare Group working with scientists to improve water quality in their river. Success fac- tors for water user committees making decisions about water resource management include creating opportunities to commu- nicate and build trust, share scientific knowledge on the issue, and willingness to compromise. Functioning catchment groups have potential to take on delegated governance responsibility for meeting agreed water quality and other community goals. Finally a scenario modelling framework IDEAS (Integrated Dynamic Environmental Assessment System) is presented, in which environmental indicators such as nutrient fluxes are simulated alongside socio-economic indicators such as job num - bers and catchment GDP for a range of land and marine use options.

Managing invasive plants in a rural-amenity landscape: the role of social capital and Landcare

Rural-amenity migration is changing the social and ecological compositions of landscapes globally. The in-migration of new landholders is contributing to significant biophysical changes to rural landscapes, as well as the weakening of collective awareness, knowledge and skills needed to manage natural resources. This is leading to the proliferation of environmental harm. This paper focuses on invasive plants as one such harm, detailing how collective action is developed and challenged in a rural landscape undergoing increasing property turnover and diversifying management priorities. Focusing on the role of a Landcare group, located in southern New South Wales, Australia, I explore how social capital – with a particular focus on trust and social norms – is mobilised to recruit newly arrived residents and maintain commitment among landholders to manage invasive plants. This research provides insights into how policy can better steer management interventions, particularly how to develop and maintain collective action in diversifying rural landscapes.

Governing through representatives of the community: A case study on farmer organizations in rural Australia

The concept ‘governing through the community’ has been used frequently to interpret the neoliberal policy embraced by Australian governments since the 1990s. Yet explanation is still inadequate of how ‘governing through the community’ is conducted in practice, particularly the specific mechanisms that regulate interaction among government agencies, groups seeking to represent the community and individuals in the community. In this study, we find that ‘governing through the community’ is actually ‘governing through representatives of the community’ because it is the representatives that make the community visible and governable. This observation is based on a case study of three kinds of farmer organizations, in two states of Australia, who see their role as serving the community and are regarded by outsiders as representatives of the community at least on certain issues. An understanding of the interaction among different stakeholders within and outside of the community is developed through three themes of ‘paperwork’, ‘data’ and ‘price’ that were used by locals from Landcare groups, grower groups and farmer cooperatives, respectively, to articulate how they experience the mechanisms through which their interactions are regulated. This paper concludes that these groups can claim to represent some residents within a defined geographical area, rather than any exact definition of ‘the community’ and that this is a sufficient claim to enable these groups to participate in the process of ‘governing through the community’. The tensions between government agencies, community representatives and community members threaten the legitimacy of the community representatives as intermediaries. Government agencies do try to contribute to reduce these tensions by strengthening the legitimacy of community representatives through various policy and project mechanisms. However, while the stated aim of ‘governing through the community’ is often focused on producing a ‘flourishing rural community’ through improving democratic modes of representation, this study demonstrates that it is only part of the community, namely the ‘targeted customers’ of the farmer organizations, that is potentially reachable to ‘the state’.

Policy Change and Its Effect on Australian Community-based Natural Resource Management Practices

The authors of this article report on a qualitative study of Australian community-based natural resource management groups known as Landcare groups. They discuss how four Landcare groups contributed to sustainability practices and how a policy change implemented in 2003 influenced the efforts of the groups to remain active in their activities. Using case-study methodology and drawing on Habermasian theory to support their work, the authors show that changing administrative structures created a tighter connection among government policies, projects and landholders carrying out natural resource management projects. The tighter connections provide more efficient processes to deliver officially valued outcomes as they are mediated by the catchment management authorities, but that efficiency is achieved at a cost because each landholder is now in competition with other landholders in the catchment to improve his/her own properties. Now the landholders are clients of the system, as private consumers rather than as a local community.

More than something to hold the plants up: soil as a non-human ally in the struggle for food justice

Healthy, fertile soil is the material of life itself. It is chemically, biologically and physically structured to support the growth of healthy, environmentally sustainable foods. Recent years have seen a resurgent focus on soil science in Australia. Yet, the influence of soil in the politics of food systems has received comparatively little attention, despite long awareness in farming communities of how the natural world shapes farmers’ choices and possible actions. Drawing on work with SoilCare, a Landcare group with a focus on soil processes in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, this paper explores the usefulness of approaching soil as an actor in food systems. Taking a participatory approach, and drawing on recent work on new materialisms, we argue that soil can be understood as an important ally in the struggle to shape a just and sustainable food system. While this work is intended to test this idea through a modest local case study, it may point to important new avenues for investigation in food politics.

Multi-functional landscapes from the grassroots? The role of rural producer movements

Around the world, agricultural landscapes are increasingly seen as “multi-functional” spaces, expected to deliver food supplies while improving rural livelihoods and protecting and restoring healthy ecosystems. To support this array of functions and benefits, governments and civil society in many regions are now promoting integrated farm- and landscape-scale management strategies, in lieu of fragmented management strategies. While rural producers are fundamental to achieving multi-functional landscapes, they are frequently viewed as targets of, or barriers to, landscape-oriented initiatives, rather than as leading agents of change. In reality, however, rural producers in many areas have embraced elements of multi-functional land management. In this paper, we explore the role and recent evolution of producer movements in influencing multi-functional farm and landscape management. We explore these roles through six case studies, including a land reform movement in Brazil, indigenous territorial development in Bolivia, conservation agriculture associations in Canada, environmental cooperatives in the Netherlands, indigenous and biocultural heritage associations in Peru, and Landcare groups in the Philippines. These experiences suggest that producer movements are playing pivotal roles in supporting landscape multi-functionality, not only through agroecological farming practices but also through off-farm efforts to conserve ecosystems and support multi-stakeholder landscape planning. On the other hand, interests of producer movements are not always fully aligned with multi-functional landscape management approaches. The contribution of producer movements to multi-functional landscapes depends on these movements including farm and landscape stewardship in their values and goals, and having the political support and capacity to engage meaningfully in multi-stakeholder processes.

Integrating Geomorphological Assessments and Oral Histories in Catchment Management: Implications for the Mulgrave River, Northeastern Australia

The dramatic decline in the integrity of Australian river systems in recent decades has seen the development of landcare and catchment management groups across the continent as the main facilitators of river rehabilitation works. There is growing concern for the need to develop adaptive management frameworks that assist informed decision making through the integration of social and geomorphological knowledge into catchment planning. In the Mulgrave River Catchment of northeastern Queensland, difficult management decisions have to be made with limited access to knowledge of natural processes and baseline geomorphological data. To date management decisions have been based almost exclusively on oral histories that state that point bars are accreting and the river is becoming shallower due to bank erosion. As a result bank stabilisation and removal of sand from within the channel have been recommended in the absence of any geomorphological assessments. This study compares oral histories of river bank erosion in the Mulgrave River with geomorphic evidence to highlight the need for integrated landscape scenario planning. The results of grain size analysis of bank and bed material from 27 locations, involving 47 samples, suggest that bank erosion cannot be delivering sediments to point bars. Furthermore, qualitative analysis of historic parish maps and aerial photographs shows that there has only been moderate bank erosion at three locations along the Mulgrave River since European settlement. The study demonstrates the important role that geomorphological investigations have for catchment management and the need for management frameworks that integrate geomorphological processes and landholder priorities for sustainable river management.

Avian biodiversity in the coastal wetlands of the Okahukura Peninsula

The Tapora Landcare Group, operating on the Okahukura Peninsula, has the long-term goal of making this region predator fenced. The aim of this study was to obtain information on the current status of avian biodiversity and the bird community across the band of coastal wetlands on the Okahukura Peninsula. Bird counts were conducted and playback lures used to detect three cryptic wetland species: fernbirds (Bowdleria punctata); spotless crakes (Porzana tabuensis); and banded rails (Gallirallus philippensis). Fernbirds and banded rails were detected at seven of the eight wetland sites sampled whereas spotless crakes were detected at two sites. The native species with the highest relative abundance across the eight sites were silvereyes (Zosterops lateralis) and South Island pied oystercatchers (Haematopus finschi). Changes in avian biodiversity over time in the region can now be monitored, and comprehensive long-term data on the status of avian biodiversity over time obtained.

Three cooperative pathways to solving a collective weed management problem

The spread of pest plants is a trans-boundary problem that causes losses to biodiversity and disrupts ecosystems. Much social research into, and policy development for, weeds has conceptualised their control as a problem facing individual landowners, rather than as a collective action problem. In the case of serrated tussock (Nassella trichotoma), a highly invasive, noxious weed that is widespread in southeastern Australia, landowners and government staff are acutely aware that this weed is a communal problem. Analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed that landowners and agency staff believe there are three pathways available for communities to achieve greater weed control collectively. These involve sharing information, providing support and applying pressure. These pathways provide two options for future policy development. Firstly, future policies could use the findings to make minor adjustments to the way information is distributed, funding is provided and enforcement is administered. Alternatively, future policies could be refocused to acknowledge good farm management, encourage better relationships among neighbours and build on the social capital that exists in Landcare groups.

Vale Landcare: the rise and decline of community-based natural resource management in rural Australia

For almost two decades, community Landcare groups and supporting institutional bodies were the focus of agri-environmental policy in Australia. Despite the successes of Landcare, the programme faces challenges securing funding in an era of agri-environmental policy that preferences economic mechanisms, such as market-based instruments, for devolving funding. This longitudinal study examines how Landcare group activity and membership in one catchment have changed over the last decade. Community Landcare groups in the study area were in ‘sleeper mode’ or had ceased to exist, partially as a result of funding and structural arrangements and several other factors that undermined both community Landcare groups and the regional Landcare network.

Understanding the role and influence of social norms: lessons for NRM

Much has been written about social norms in disciplines such as law and economics but they are less studied in the field of Natural Resource Management (NRM). Although norms are acknowledged to be an influence on decision–making, they are difficult to identify and measure in the field and their role is often implicit or not well understood or articulated. This paper addresses an important knowledge gap by combining social norms theory with the specifics of a particular case study. We examined the influence of social norms on landholder behaviour in a small rural community undergoing demographic change in Australia. Findings from interviews with landholders and government agency personnel indicate that established norms within the farming community are influencing incoming landholders; and that new norms and practices have also emerged as a result of government investment through the local Landcare group. We suggest that a better understanding of social norms in different contexts will give rise to strategies that make NRM interventions more effective.

EXPLORING THE APPLICATION OF VOLUNTEERED GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION TO CATCHMENT MANAGEMENT: A SURVEY APPROACH

Abstract. The participation and engagement of grass-root level community groups and citizens for natural resource management has a long history. With recent developments in ICT tools and spatial technology, these groups are seeking a new opportunity to manage natural resource data. There are lot of spatial information collected/generated by landcare groups, land holders and other community groups at the grass-root level through their volunteer initiatives. State government organisations are also interested in gaining access to this spatial data/information and engaging these groups to collect spatial information under their mapping programs. The aim of this paper is to explore the possible utilisation of volunteered geographic information (VGI) for catchment management activities. This research paper discusses the importance of spatial information and spatial data infrastructure (SDI) for catchment management and the emergence of VGI. A conceptual framework has been developed to illustrate how these emerging spatial information applications and various community volunteer activities can contribute to a more inclusive spatial data infrastructure (SDI) development at local level. A survey of 56 regional NRM bodies in Australia was utilised to explore the current community-driven volunteer initiatives for NRM activities and the potential of utilisation of VGI initiatives for NRM decision making process. This research paper concludes that VGI activities have great potential to contribute to SDI development at the community level to achieve better natural resource management (NRM) outcomes.

An accidental outcome: Social capital and its implications for Landcare and the “status quo”

For 25 years the Australian Landcare program has encouraged rural land managers to work cooperatively to resolve natural resource management issues across the nation. Landcare has spread and the model is used internationally. Despite its successes, Landcare has come under criticism for not sufficiently directing land management practices towards environmental sustainability. This criticism sees it as having maintained the “status quo”.Alternatively Landcare has been credited with acting as an agent that creates social capital, bringing neighbours together to share ideas and implement cooperative projects. We use the concept of social capital to offer insight into how Landcare groups as social networks can either inhibit or promote changes in land management.Using findings from a study of 16 Landcare groups in South Eastern Victoria, Australia, we demonstrate that various forms of social capital can act to either inhibit or empower individuals and groups to challenge the status quo of land management practice. We explain how the intentions of these grass roots organisations are to emphasise local knowledge, ownership and power. However, in some cases these actions produce the accidental outcome of maintaining the status quo. We argue that the way Landcare groups are supported can further aggravates this.At a time when the health of Landcare is in question, and the need for solutions to natural resource management problems are critical, understanding the implications of these findings will enable institutions to tailor programs to facilitate groups to challenge the status quo and reinvigorate interest in Landcare as a community building model.

Building community capacity and social infrastructure through landcare: a case study of land grant engagement

In the struggle to remain true to their technical assistance and civic engagement missions in an era of shrinking budgets and increasingly complex accountability claims, land grant universities have developed different engagement strategies to contribute to the development of surrounding communities. Drawing on Flora and Flora’s (in Ann Am Acad Polit Soc Sci, 48, 1993) assertion that a strong and “entrepreneurial” social infrastructure is critical for facilitating lasting change and development in communities (particularly rural communities), this article presents a case study of a land grant university’s engagement with a community landcare group from the perspective of building social capacity in surrounding communities. This case explores Virginia Tech’s involvement in facilitating and supporting Catawba Landcare using three theoretical frames—Ronald Heifetz’s concept of “holding environments” as a safe and facilitated space where social learning can occur; ecological and social entrepreneurship and the roles and functions required to support these forms of entrepreneurship; and the concept of learning action networks in which otherwise disparate partners are linked under common goals and collectively learn how to manage the situation at hand. Using these three theoretical frames, this paper posits landcare as a model of engagement for land grant universities thus contributing to the construction of social infrastructure.