Suchergebnisse

The United Nations and other international aid organisations have invested many millions of dollars exploring how best to build the economic and social fabric of the developing world sustainably. The tools and approaches used have real application elsewhere as they deal with community engagement, governance and institutional reform, the attraction and retention of professionals as well as quality assurance and market competitiveness. While the target market is different from Australia's regions, the tools used are well defined and tested and have generic application. This paper overviews the issues surrounding 10 case studies undertaken by the UN in the Central Asian and Southern Asian Regions and considers the lessons learned and their application to sustainable regional development and environmental management in Australia.The paper draws on the work of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) technical cooperation project which focused on the widely spread problems of poverty and environmental threats to communities in two of the Asian regions covering five countries each in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) and Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam). The project focuses on institutional capacity building and networking to build sustainable regional communities and economies. Specifically, the project is designed to improve institutional capacity and the articulation of policies and practices for local governance for regional economic development, through community based initiatives. With some innovation and lateral thinking can these well researched tools and processes have applicability to the Australian regional community development context.

The "Blueprint for the Bush" a joint initiative of the Queensland Government and an agri-political lobby group called AgForce, is an innovative attempt to develop a 10-year plan to help Queensland's rural and remote communities and industries manage change, build their strengths and increase their sustainability. This initiative was developed out of a "re-framing of the policy context of regional development in Queensland and is a fist attempt to address the issues confronting the sustainability and vitality of Queensland's Regions. This paper examines the "Blueprint for the Bush" as a complex regional development initiative involving inland rural Queensland communities with stable or declining populations, limited diversity in their economic structures, aging infrastructure, an aging population and a desire to retain services and grow their populations. The formation of new relationships and a resulting change in self-perception, appreciation of the external environment and functional relationships between communities is highlighted in the paper as a signpost of a potential change to regional communities and potentially if realised a powerful aid in regional development. However the question remains as to whether the initiative has gone far enough or provides an adequate framework to address the underlining and systemic issues confronting rural and regional Queensland. Drawing on the work of a range of authors on civic engagement, community, democracy, public policy and regional development, the paper critiques the "Blueprint for the Bush" and explores the adequacy of the approach in reframing the policy and partnership environments and the ability of the plan to act as an enduring catalyst for true innovative and enduring change that will achieve sustainable regional development.

Coming from a historical perspective, it is argued that East/West migration to GB is not a new phenomenon: Russian Jews arrived at the turn of the twentieth century & members of the Polish Armed Forces & Displaced Persons in the mid-to-late 1940s. Prevailing political & economic considerations, as well as "race-thinking," informed official responses to these refugee movements, & the ideological representations of current British policy toward refugees from the former Yugoslavia illustrate how refugee status is socially determined, rather than inherent in a particular set of circumstances. Adapted from the source document.