The researchers suggest that bureaucrats
in coastal cities cannot understand the
needs of the outback as well as locals.
Image: iStockphoto

Sweeping changes in the management of water and other key resources and in the structure of the desert institutions responsible for them are recommended in a new report from the desert Knowledge CRC.

“Let the locals lead – they know what is best. You could say that sums it up,” says Dr Alex Smajgl, a leader of the DKCRC team which prepared the study “Outback Institutions - an application of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to four case studies in Australia’s outback”.

The study covered four Outback regions – the Etheridge and Diamantina Shires in Queensland and the Daly River region and Alice Springs water resources planning in the NT. It found that the unique local situation facing each of these regions, driven by the variable desert climate, argues for greater empowerment and better support for local people in making their own decisions.

“The Australian outback is a unique ecological and social landscape,” the study says. “The people who live here cope with harsh and variable environmental conditions, particularly in terms of rainfall and the availability of surface water. The human population density is very low – less than 0.001 people per km2 – which is considerably less than the national average of 2.6 people per km2. This population is widely dispersed around small urban centres that are remote from major Australian cities.

“Environmental drivers are dominated by the availability of water, with ‘droughts and flooding rains’likely to remain a central feature of life in outback regions of Australia. Water supply for human or ecosystem use across this region is determined by the highly variable rainfall and very high evaporation rates relative to rainfall.

“Water issues are very different between coastal and interior outback regions, including in the regions in this study. Along the coastal and semi-arid region surface water flows are more reliable; in the interior they are highly episodic and hence unreliable. In the interior, water bores are vitally important sources of reliable water necessary to support human populations and their production systems. These harsh environmental factors frame all human activities in these regions.”

Faced with such limitations remote bureaucracies in coastal capitals cannot be expected to grasp the detail of situations affecting local communities spread of thousands of square kilometres of the inland.

At the same time the sheer size of some of these desert regions means they sometimes fall under many overlapping federal, state and local jurisdictions, creating a governmental maze which perplexes and exhausts those trying to navigate it.

The report’s recommendations centre on eight key areas:

• changing desert institutions by devolving centralised power to them
• improving the capacity of local people to lead and participate
• improving the transparency of the decision-making process
• improving its fairness
• ensuring ways to manage conflict are in place
• improving the accessibility of information
• giving greater recognition to the local context
• establishing effective monitoring.

“Primarily we found that devolving power downwards can improve decision-making outcomes under the challenging conditions of the Outback,” Dr Smajgl says.

“There need to be well-defined resource boundaries, based on real science, to let people know what they should be doing to manage the resources well.

“Also there needs to be a lot more transparency about who is in charge, what they are doing and the extent of their powers.”

The report also places strong emphasis on capacity building – training up local leaders to take charge of these new responsibilities and to acknowledge all the different interests that come into play when resources like water and land use are under debate. Where conflicts arise, there need to be effective mechanisms to manage them.

It urges greater recognition of local knowledge and a more helpful stance in providing information by state agencies.

And it commends ways of monitoring the performance of local institutions that tell the desert community how well they are performing, ensure genuine outcomes in land, water and environmental management and also enable state and federal bodies to see what is going on.

The study can be found
here.