Suchergebnisse

The article uses the example of a region in the Australian State of Queensland to illustrate the emergence during the 1990s of a plethora of regional organizations including Catchment Coordinating Committees, Regional Development Organisations and Regional Organisations of Councils. Some have regarded this profusion of sub-national bodies as diminishing the role of the state. Certainly one result was ambiguity in the roles and responsibilities of different bodies and different levels of government. Weaving together these disparate initiatives into a coordinated system of regional governance is a significant challenge. A case study of the Central Queensland region supports recent sociological accounts of changes in governance notably those of Fung and Wright (Empowered Participatory Governance), Healey (Collaborative Planning) and Sorensen and Torfing (Network Governance). The analysis identifies institutional features and normative principles of an emerging, multi-layered and multi-stakeholder, form of governance where a network employing deliberative practices coordinates formal political institutions and other actors from non-state sectors. These offer a potential model of regional governance suggesting the network form (with a role for state actors, but not state-dominated) and deliberative decision-making practices may provide coherence and coordination in policy-formulation and administration at a regional level.

With increasing focus on the place of women in development by multilateral agencies, donor countries and non-governmental organisations, various strategies of intervention are employed. One such intervention results in poor illiterate women in Orissa, redefining their position in contrast to the dominant discourses and gender ideology of state, religion and economy, to over come culturally enshrined powerlessness. From the observation of the work of the People's Rural Education Movement (PREM), and the women's organisations and credit unions they support and foster it is clear that such women's groups are appropriately understood as feminist in that they have claimed the right to speak for themselves (and those with whom they are attempting to change the social order); conceptualised an alternative social order and defined for themselves alternative social, political and economic activities within it; are challenging the mass of constructed ideas, values and myths around their gender; and are also challenging the social construction of male-female dualism and the ways in which it is reinforced. Their activities are considered in terms of Kristeva's three tiers of feminist thought: liberal feminism, radical feminism and symbolic-order post-structural feminism.

Since the Second World War, Australian governments have adopted various approaches to governing nonmetropolitan Australia. The authors profile three distinct approaches to governance characterised as (1) state-centred regionalism; (2) new localism; and (3) new forms of multifaceted regionalism. Although recent policy initiatives have been justified by the argument that the region is the most suitable scale for planning and development in nonmetropolitan Australia, in practice the institutional landscape is a hybrid of overlapping local, regional, and national scales of action. The authors compare this new, multifaceted, regionalism with the so-called 'new regionalism' currently being promoted in Western Europe and North America. It is argued that new regionalism differs in quite important ways from the regionalism currently being fostered in Australia. In Australia, the centrality of sustainability principles, and the attempt to foster interdependence amongst stakeholders from the state, market, and civil society, have produced a layer of networked governance that is different from that overseas. It is argued that there is a triple bottom-line 'promise' in the Australian approach which differs from the Western Europe/North American model, and which has the potential to deliver enhanced economic, social, and environmental outcomes.

During rapid resource development in a highly contested arena, effective processes for characterising cumulative, social and economic impacts are needed. In this article, we explain a strategy that uses an iterative process involving stakeholders to identify indicators of impacts of onshore natural gas development. The aim of the strategy is to arrive at a small set of indicators that those in the community, government and industry agree are salient and credible.Four major joint ventures are investing more than A$60 billion to tap Queensland, Australia's onshore natural gas resources. Thousands of wells are reaching into natural gas in seams of coal that lie below aquifers that residents refer to as essential for their heavily agricultural region. The magnitude of these developments has been depicted as threatening the traditional base of political power that has rested with farmers. Nearby coal mining has given some communities the experience of the boomtown cycle, but it is placing unfamiliar strains on municipal resources in other towns. Gas companies provide funds in attempts to mitigate impacts, satisfying requirements of their elaborate social impact management plans (SIMPs).The research reported in this paper, though only mid-way to completion, suggests that an action-research approach to developing indicators of cumulative impacts on housing, business, employment, liveability and trust in government shows promise for enabling stakeholders to track the multi-faceted effects of a resource boom. We hope that such work helps stakeholders to mitigate the ups and downs of the cycle of boom, bust and recovery that can be driven by resource development.

AbstractSocial inequality in resource‐dependent regions is a growing problem. Increasingly both state and private actors are acting as meta‐governors to address the issue. In this article, we focus on housing inequality as 'the canary in the coalmine' for broader social inequality. While affordable housing has been the subject of growing attention in urban scholarship, relatively few studies have considered the governance of affordable housing in rural regions. We report on a case analysis of affordable housing governance in the Gladstone‐Surat Region, a traditional agricultural area of Australia that has experienced a dramatic increase in housing inequality due to significant coal seam gas development in recent years. We show that networked arrangements for affordable housing delivery were the product of strategic policy structuring, resourcing, and hands‐off framing by the state government. Private meta‐governance was exercised only in relation to process management forms of meta‐governance, with private companies facilitating local 'arenas' for stakeholder discussion and connecting stakeholders in a synergistic manner. The dynamics of the case‐study examined demonstrate that meta‐governance in rural regions is not just about coordinating and mobilising horizontal (e.g., regional) cooperation, but about coalescing action within multiscale 'exogenous' networks and structures. These findings have important implications for future efforts to address social inequality in rural areas.

Extractive industries have significant social, economic, and environmental impacts on the communities in which they operate; and, if well governed, the sector can contribute to sustainable local development. With this paper we analyze public sector dimensions of efforts to manage the development pressures associated with mining in Australia by examining the legislative and policy framework of various levels of government. We outline recent legislative trends and variations across jurisdictions. We also identify gaps and inadequacies in the regulatory framework and the implications of these with respect to emerging governance challenges and practices in mining-intensive regions of Australia—particularly for local governments. We identify forms of networked governance in mining regions involving initiatives of and relationships between local governments, state governments, mining companies, and other stakeholders. These governance arrangements are characterized by (1) variety of institutions, (2) attention to mining-specific impacts, and (3) dispersal of resources, responsibilities, and authority.

Effective policy responses to the ageing of the population are a priority area for government and non‐government agencies across Australia, particularly at the community level. This article focuses on the policy goal of ageing well at the local level, and more specifically, the strong principle of collaboration that underpins this goal. Too little is known about how to achieve effective collaboration in the ageing field. This article aims to address this by developing an analytical framework from the broad literature on collaborative processes, and applying this framework to data collected from interviews with stakeholders in ageing across two local communities in Queensland. While participants recognise the importance and strength of working together and provide local examples of how this has been achieved effectively, they also acknowledge the associated challenges and complexity. This all spanned the six factors of the framework: the context of ageing; the characteristics and relationships between partners; the need for adequate procedures; as well as structure and relationships aimed at building capacity; a shared sense of purpose; and access to adequate resources.