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Natural Resources Management: wicked problems and behavioural change

Dr Conall O’Connell
Secretary
Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry

Thursday, 25 October 2007

Thank you, Lynelle.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

I hope to do three things.

First - give you a quick sense of why natural resource management problems are wicked.

Second - set out the bare bones of the ‘top down’ response to natural resource management that we have developed within the Australian Government – and with our partners in the states and the regions.

And third - provide an example of how behavioral change in natural resource management can be driven over the long term by ‘bottom up’ peer to peer learning.

Natural Resource Management – a wicked problem

What are natural resource management problems? In general terms, they mostly arise as the consequences of natural resource allocation.

For example, the majority of the Australian landscape is owned or managed by farmers and graziers. They earn their living by growing and selling produce in a highly competitive market. We benefit from that by having relatively cheap and available food – and also by the associated export oriented economic activity.

Farming necessarily involves making changes to the basic constituents of the environment - natural resources such as soil and water, flora and fauna.

The environments that farmers modify also provide a range of other benefits.

For example, stabilising salt and nutrients in the landscape, storing carbon, maintaining water and air quality, supporting wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
We are now used to calling these benefits ‘ecosystem services’.

Ecosystems are complex and can be unpredictable when disturbed. When they are radically modified or collapse we may lose their services.

So it is important that we manage the balance between productive use and conservation of soil and water, flora and fauna.

Many natural resource management challenges demonstrate all the characteristics of wicked problems.

NRM issues are economically and socially complex and require the involvement of a range of stakeholders.

That is, all levels of government, NGOs, private sector, regional communities, and individual landholders.
These stakeholders may have quite different material interests operating over different timescales, with entrenched values.

NRM issues are long term in nature – such as land degradation – and so need sustained responses and commitment, including funding.

Typically, government budgetary processes have difficulties with long-term planning and investment strategies. They may effectively lock in programmes for many years with necessarily imprecise performance measures.

NRM problems are difficult to define, the science is often young and quantification of problems partial.

NRM problems range from paddock to landscape in scale.

So they need local, regional and national level action.

NRM problems are complex in terms of cause–effect relationships.

For example, the relationship between vegetation, water and salinity management in much of the Australian landscape is still poorly understood.

Often, NRM decisions involve many major trade-offs between long and short term benefits. It is not all win-win.

For example, water for crops versus water for the environment. Over recent years, we have seen that most explicitly in trying to get the balance right on the River Murray.

Moreover, NRM problems are dynamic over time - what seems suitable today may not be suitable tomorrow.

We used to think broad scale vegetation planting was the main answer to salinity. Now we know that we need to target planting very carefully.

To deliver decisions that have sufficient community support under these circumstances, we need to bring together the different interests, knowledge and values through multi-stakeholder collaboration, to nut out targets, compromises and balances.

From the top down

Within the Australian Government we have developed over recent years a radical approach to addressing the Commonwealth level of responsibility.

National leadership was needed for a national problem – but at the time we lacked a focal point for that leadership.

We had two portfolios – agriculture and environment – which reflected related but different policy interests.
Separately, we did not reflect whole of government thinking or joined up government.

So, in a radical innovation in administration, the two departments fused our natural resource management programme delivery interests into a single joint Australian Government Natural Resource Management Team.

This Team has been staffed homogenously by both departments.
We have used this to internalise much of our policy and programme discussions and emerge with a single voice to our Ministers, the rest of government and the wider community.
And we have built on this initiative to drive extensive collaboration across much of our cross-departmental interests.

This has allowed the Australian Government to deal with all NRM stakeholders in a clearly unified way. It has allowed us to talk to rural communities about natural resource management with a single voice.

We used the delivery of the Natural Heritage Trust - now a programme of more than $5 billion over its life - as the vehicle to project the Joint Team thinking into our relationship with State Governments and regional communities. Our two Minsters jointly take the lead as the NHT Board members.

Joint Commonwealth/State Steering Committees were given responsibility for managing regional programme elements. They work with 56 regional community natural resource management bodies across Australia.
These 56 regional bodies developed natural resource management plans and investment strategies for their regions. The plans and investment strategies were then put to State and Commonwealth ministers for funding investment approval.

In 2006 an independent review of the Natural Heritage Trust found that¹ the NRM regional delivery model has:

helped generate awareness and focus on complex issues; and
provided accountability mechanisms while allowing for flexibility, innovation, collaboration, and regional ownership.

The review also noted that we did this with a principles-based approach rather than by prescription.

Consistent with this approach, we intend to evolve the regional delivery model as we go into a new funding cycle for the Natural Heritage Trust.

For example, we hope to move to larger-scale more integrated multi-objective projects, focusing on protecting high-value NRM assets.

Of course, there have been many trips and stumbles – and it remains an imperfect world.

We have learned that we need time and patience to deliver.
We have also learned to tolerate uncertainties, and the occasional failure.

But broadly speaking there has been a slow revolution in the dealings between the Australian Government, State governments and regional communities on funding natural resource management.

The Natural Heritage Trust and its regional delivery model represent a ‘top down’ response to problems.

But we don’t see this as the only way to do business.

From the bottom up -

- the National Landcare Programme demonstrates how my Department has been able to achieve behavioural change by supporting, in a light handed way, a broad community movement.

As I have mentioned previously, solutions to many NRM problems require continuous and sustained behaviour change, especially from landholders.

The Landcare movement was started in the early 1980s by farmers and rural communities - with the support of conservationists. It aimed to deal with land degradation and local/on-farm natural resource management issues. In this sense, it is a truly bottom-up movement.

The National Landcare Programme provides dedicated funding which, at its core, targets support for local voluntary Landcare groups.

It is deliberately identified with agriculture industry interests. This means it is broadly accepted by farmers across the country as supporting activities that combine profitability with conservation.

Landcare groups facilitate behavioural change in a number of ways.

Landcare groups support ‘farmers teaching farmers’ - peer group experiences.
Skills and knowledge are developed and transferred within and across the groups. The risk of novelty is reduced by seeing others’ successes.
Both peer support and peer pressure bring about adoption and behaviour changes.
Farmers who participate in a local community landcare project are likely to have loyalty to their peers and will stay for the long haul.
Importantly, this is not the Government - whether from Canberra or a State capital - telling the farmer what to do.

The existence of the National Landcare Programme as a funding base for the movement is not just a source of dollars.

It is seen by participants as recognition by the Australian Government that the Landcare movement, and so the individual landholder, is addressing an important and continuing national need.

In the past 15 years of supporting the landcare movement, we have witnessed a large increase in landcare group membership;

For instance, an ABARE survey a couple of years ago showed that 41% of broad-acre and dairy farmers were members of a landcare group. And even more of them - 75% - use landcare groups as a source of information on farm management.²

We know that participation in a landcare group improves knowledge of NRM issues.

And that, members of landcare groups are more likely to adopt good NRM practices than farmers who are not members.
The ABARE survey noted that around 90% of farmers participating in landcare activities were in a position to work with the causes, signs, and treatment of degradation problems – and had made changes to their land management practices.³

In these two case studies, the top down and bottom up approaches address similar problems from a different angle. They work together and do not compete.

I will close on a slight note of caution. Horst Rittel, who coined the term ‘wicked problems’ emphasised that a key feature of them is that in managing them we can distort them into new problems or create others.

With wicked problems, we need to give ourselves room to be open and honest about the new problems that emerge as we deal with the original problem – and not have that seen as a sign of failure which demands that the approach be abandoned.

As we know, we are not solving these problems - it is not chess and there is rarely an endgame. We are managing them to make things better than they were.

Thank you.

1 Keogh, K. Chant, D. and Frazer, B (2006), Review of Arrangements for Regional Delivery of Natural Resource Management Programs.

2 Hodges, A & Goesch, T (2006), ‘Australian Farms: NRM in 2007-05’ ABARE Research Paper 06.12

3 Ibid