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Existing planning theories tend to be limited in their analytical scope and often fail to account for the impact of many interactions between the multitudes of stakeholders involved in strategic planning processes. Although many theorists rejected structural–functional approaches from the 1970s, this article argues that many of structural–functional concepts remain relevant and useful to planning practitioners. In fact, structural–functional approaches are highly useful and practical when used as a foundation for systemic analysis of real-world, multi-layered, complex planning systems to support evidence-based governance reform. Such approaches provide a logical and systematic approach to the analysis of the wider governance of strategic planning systems that is grounded in systems theory and complementary to existing theories of complexity and planning. While we do not propose its use as a grand theory of planning, this article discusses how structural–functional concepts and approaches might be applied to underpin a practical analysis of the complex decision-making arrangements that drive planning practice, and to provide the evidence needed to target reform of poorly performing arrangements.

While the Australian Government's Developing Northern Australia (NA) strategy sets ambitious targets for major essential infrastructure such as roads and water, relatively less attention has been paid how telecommunications and internet needs will be met to ensure NA is competitive and livable in the digital age. According to the Australian Digital Inclusion Index, Northern Australians are far less digitally included that their southern counterparts across three sub-indices: internet access, affordability and digital ability. We sought to understand the lived experience of digital exclusion in rural and remote agricultural communities in North West Queensland. In partnership with Northern Gulf Resource Management Group, and with funding from the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, we undertook ethnographic interviews, focus groups and participant observation at rural events and on cattle properties in the Northern Gulf region. The findings represent a rich understanding of the specific, unique factors that contribute to low levels of digital inclusion in rural and remote areas, along with impacts for agricultural families and communities. Regarding access, rural residents said that current services were insufficient to serve their families' growing education and social needs, or to maintain, grow or expand their businesses, citing issues with speed, data caps, intermittent connections and poor customer service. On the other hand, smaller households in remote areas with relatively modest internet were reasonably satisfied they could complete essential activities online. Regarding affordability, participants on the cusp of several unreliable mobile and internet services tend to "layer up" their devices and plans to ensure they have access when and where they need, which compounds the cost of being connected. Finally, digital ability varies substantially across generations and genders in these households and communities, resulting in diverse unmet needs that require nuanced solutions. We conclude the paper with implications of these findings, including questioning what equitable digital inclusion should look like in sparsely populated areas, a need to redefine our understanding of affordability, and an urgent call for place-based digital ability programs in agricultural Australia.

[Extract] There is much discussion and debate within the Australian community, government, the media and academia about the future development and potential of northern Australia. Foreign and Australian agriculturalists are looking to the nation's north with a weather-eye on food security and new economic opportunities. Mineral and energy exploration and development across the north have buttressed the nation's economic success over several decades. At the same time, the conservation sector would like to see the north's outstanding ecological values protected, and indeed, our tourism industry has been substantively based on the protection of key natural assets such as the Barrier Reef, the Kakadu wetlands and the Wet Tropics World Heritage Areas. Conservation and resource development interests alike, however, have had a mixed inter-face with the interests of the north's traditional owners, many of whom remain trapped in welfare dependency and poverty. Dale (2014) suggests that there are real opportunities for northern Australians within these new national debates. He considers that post-war northern Australian history has been characterised by several national-scale conflicts being played out in and around the north's regional and local communities. Some of these major conflicts have centred on managing the impact and legacy of major mining, agriculture and energy developments. Others have concerned the impact of growing government regulation that is constraining development opportunities within the northern Australian landscape. These types of development and conservation-based conflicts, however, strongly interface with the bigger policy debates about how to 'close the gap' between Indigenous and other Australians. These three issues represent conflict between very different sectors within Australian society, and have been based on vastly different narratives about the future of the north.

[Extract] The Cairns Institute, James Cook University and the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation have established a project focused on the contribution of agriculture to regional development. Agriculture is important to many regions of Australia contributing directly to regional economies as well as indirectly making social and environmental contributions to regional sustainability. To continue to make this significant contribution agricultural industries have had to adjust to changes in markets, cost structures, government policies and technology as well as environmental risks including drought and natural disasters. How agriculture responds to these changes, however, varies from region to region with some industries remaining static or declining while others have evolved and adapted more readily to change. It has long been known that regions grow at different rates and this project builds on recent international research (Barca et. al. 2012; OECD, 2006; OECD, 2012) that supports a regional development approach that seeks to maximise the growth potential of all regions in Australia. Understanding how to maximise agriculture's contribution to regional development requires questions to be answered regarding how agriculture fits within a regional development context, what factors underpin agricultures contribution, how agricultural industries evolve and develop in regions, and how to make the most of opportunities for agriculture to benefit regional economies and communities. Understanding the trends and issues that agricultural and related industries face in this regional 'place based' context can better inform regional and national policy by providing insights into how issues play out in a 'place'. These insights may assist to identify and address constraints to industry development, but also opportunities to facilitate agriculture's contribution to regional development. The project will result in the development of an agriculture development framework to guide policy and practice and the Wet Tropics of Far North Queensland (FNQ) has been identified as a pilot region for the project.

Healthy governance systems are key to delivering sound environmental management outcomes from global to local scales. There are, however, surprisingly few risk assessment methods that can pinpoint those domains and sub-domains within governance systems that are most likely to influence good environmental outcomes at any particular scale, or those if absent or dysfunctional, most likely to prevent effective environmental management. This paper proposes a new risk assessment method for analysing governance systems. This method is then tested through its preliminary application to a significant real-world context: governance as it relates to the health of Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR). The GBR exists at a supra-regional scale along most of the north eastern coast of Australia. Brodie et al (2012 Mar. Pollut. Bull. 65 81-100) have recently reviewed the state and trend of the health of the GBR, finding that overall trends remain of significant concern. At the same time, official international concern over the governance of the reef has recently been signalled globally by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). These environmental and political contexts make the GBR an ideal candidate for use in testing and reviewing the application of improved tools for governance risk assessment. ; Full Text

Healthy governance systems are key to delivering sound environmental management outcomes from global to local scales. There are, however, surprisingly few risk assessment methods that can pinpoint those domains and sub-domains within governance systems that are most likely to influence good environmental outcomes at any particular scale, or those if absent or dysfunctional, most likely to prevent effective environmental management. This paper proposes a new risk assessment method for analysing governance systems. This method is then tested through its preliminary application to a significant real-world context: governance as it relates to the health of Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR). The GBR exists at a supra-regional scale along most of the north eastern coast of Australia. Brodie et al (2012 Mar. Pollut. Bull. 65 81–100) have recently reviewed the state and trend of the health of the GBR, finding that overall trends remain of significant concern. At the same time, official international concern over the governance of the reef has recently been signalled globally by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). These environmental and political contexts make the GBR an ideal candidate for use in testing and reviewing the application of improved tools for governance risk assessment.

Leading from the North aims to improve public dialogue around the future of Northern Australia to underpin robust and flexible planning and policy frameworks. A number of areas are addressed including social infrastructure, governance systems, economic, business and regional development, climate and its implications, the roles and trends in demography and migration in the region. This book not only speaks to the issues of development in Northern Australia but also other regional areas, and examines opportunities for growth with changing economies and technologies. The authors of this book consist of leading researchers, academics and experts from Charles Darwin University, The Australian National University, James Cook University, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and many other collaborative partners. Many of the authors have first-hand experience of living and working in Northern Australia. They understand the real issues and challenges faced by people living in Northern Australia and other similar regional areas. Backed by their expertise and experience, the authors present their discussions and findings from a local perspective.

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) has grown in stature as a key component of many national natural resource and rural development governance systems. Despite their growth, the integrity of CBNRM governance systems has rarely been analysed in a national context. To enhance dialogue about how best to design and deploy such systems nationally, this paper analyses the Australian system in detail. The Australian system was selected because the nation has a globally recognised and strong history of CBNRM approaches. We first contextualise the international emergence of national CBRM governance systems before analysing the Australian system. We find that a theoretically informed approach recognising regions as the anchors in brokering multi-scale CBNRM was applied between 2000 and 2007. Subsequent policy, while strengthening indigenous roles, has tended to weaken regional brokering, Commonwealth–state cooperation and research collaboration. Our findings and consequent emerging lessons can inform Australian policy makers and other nations looking to establish (or to reform existing) CBNRM governance systems. Equally, the research approach taken represents the application of an emerging new theoretical framework for analysing complex governance systems.

[Extract] The state and trend of the GBR's ecological health remains problematic, resulting in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) raising concerns regarding GBR governance (UNESCO, 2015). While UNESCO's concerns triggered separate strategic assessments by the Australian and Queensland governments, independent and integrated reviews of the key risks within the overall system of governance influencing GBR outcomes is missing. Consequently, this project applied Governance Systems Analysis (GSA); a novel analytical framework that identifies, benchmarks and enables monitoring of the integrity of those governance themes, domains and subdomains most likely to influence environmental and socio-economic outcomes in the GBR. Indeed, while many people often think of governance of the GBR as one big system, in reality, at least 40 discrete governance subdomains influence GBR water quality outcomes. This report introduces and overviews two key outcomes from the research.

[Extract] NESP TWQ Hub Project 2.3.3 focuses on scoping water-related ecosystem services (ES) market opportunities and products that are culturally, environmentally, economically, and politically suited to CYP catchments flowing into the northern Great Barrier Reef (GBR). These kinds of ES are often known internationally by terms such as 'nutrient offsets' and 'watershed ES', and the particular focus here is on potential water quality ES (WQES). The project also considers the importance of developing water-oriented services and products that might deliver a range of additional ecosystem services (e.g. biodiversity), cultural and socio-economic benefits. Multiple-benefit products and services have the value of being both more attractive in building Indigenous livelihoods, but also potentially deliver higher market value. The project is a collaboration between researchers at CSIRO and JCU, and staff at local (Kalan Enterprises) and regional Cape York Partnership (CYPS) Indigenous development agencies in CYP. It has been designed to underpin ES-based livelihood opportunities and the realisation of social co-benefits from Indigenous Cultural Resource and Natural Resource Management (ICNRM). This report is effectively a working paper that outlines key developments in the project thus far, and outlines next steps for the second year of the project.

Northern Australia has a population of 1.2 million people across nearly half the continental landmass. It is home to many diverse communities of people, including Aboriginal nations, descendants of European, Melanesian and Asian settlers and more recent arrivals. It is an area of globally significant natural beauty with unique ecologies. It also has strategic and economic importance to Australia. A contentious debate over the future of the region can be observed within three themes: Big development, big conservation and policies seeking Indigenous wellbeing. We argue that if the agendas associated with each of these themes and their associated agents are driven forward in isolation, the tensions between the three will compromise the health, wellbeing and economic coherence and vitality of the North. This paper presents an overview of the present governance landscape with a critique of the role of neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentality. It identifies some of the ways in which 'other' social values and ways of knowing are either marginalised or rendered invisible in these narratives of governance and development. In highlighting the tensions that result from these exclusions, we argue there is a need to both understand these dynamics, and move towards an explicit commitment to open, genuine dialogue, inclusive of the communities that reside in northern Australia.