Beyond EverythingCare and EverythingWatch: public participation, public policy, and participating publics

For most people involved in resource and environmental policy and management, public participation and community involvement equals the quite recent array of programs and groups epitomised by Landcare. While applauding what has happened in Australian natural resource management (NRM) in recent years as remarkable internationally and vastly encouraging from the standpoint of domestic land management, this paper adopts a critical view and broader scope. This paper views public participation from the perspective of public policy and governance, involving many other forms of participation, and adopts an historical perspective on participation in Australian natural resource management. Two dimensions of going ‘Beyond EverythingCare and EverythingWatch’ are suggested: recognising and using various forms of participation; and institutionalising community participation as mainstream to the way we manage Australian landscapes, not marginal. The paper explores how we got to where we are, the strengths and limits of that, and what might be needed in the future. Sustainable management of Australian landscapes is a huge task – I do not think we have faced a bigger or longer challenge as a nation before. We will only achieve more sustainable natural resource management through new institutional arrangements and policies that we build together. But institutions and the organisations and policies they give rise to will always be reflections of past understanding and imperatives, and so institutional and policy change is an important topic. Whether as a society we approach this in a constructive or destructive way will depend very much on the attitudes we are developing and the policy choices we are making now. The standpoint of the paper is that we need to build ‘adaptive’ and ‘learning’ institutions and approaches to policy and management, to cope with the problems we face, like integrated land and water management, climate change, or biodiversity conservation.