On Teaching and Learning Resource and Environmental Management: reframing capacity building in multicultural settings

Abstract

This paper aims to improve preparation of stakeholders and affected interests for participation in natural resource management (NRM) processes. It argues that a reframing of relationships in multicultural NRM systems can improve individual and institutional capacities to think about and respond to intercultural domains. We argue that the professional toolkit needed to enhance the efficacy and openness of NRM must go beyond technical competence in science and economics to include a refined intercultural capacity amongst all involved. This does not refer to a unidirectional education of those perceived as lacking education, but a multi-directional capacity to reframe relationships, behaviours and practices. By reflecting on our diverse experiences of teaching and learning at the Comalco bauxite mine in far northern Queensland and in the university classroom in Sydney, we argue that a literacy in cultural landscapes is fundamental to this reframing of relationships. To use a metaphor that draws together a concern with both natural resources and geographical scale, it is simply not good enough to deal with both the forests and the trees: we also need to recognise the cultural landscapes in which both are embedded, and the cultural frames that give them different meanings.

Keywords:

• Natural resource management
• capacity building
• Indigenous rights
• Cape York Peninsula
• sustainability

Notes

1. We adopt the terms ‘natural resources’ and ‘natural resource management’ in this paper despite our general preference to construct the idea of resources much more broadly, and our discomfort with the implications of a specification of ‘natural’ as somehow opposed to the human domain (see, for example, Howitt 2001a; Howitt & Suchet-Pearson 2003). We seek to contribute to an existing discourse about ‘NRM’, and have retained that terminology in this paper.

2. We focus on the relationship between traditional owners and miners rather than a broader consideration of Indigenous people in the region in order to emphasise the implications for traditional owners of the mine's impact on their country. This creates a different set of issues to those that are constructed at a more general level between the company and Indigenous interests across the region.

3. Co-management is an idea that is more familiar from its application to management of conservation areas than commercial resource projects such as mines (e.g. Notzke 1995; Castro & Nielsen 2001). A shift to thinking of traditional Indigenous landowners and native title groups as partnerships in management of country for commercial mining, tourism, forestry and other NRM-based uses should push us towards reframing the task of intercultural engagement in such projects as co-management.

4. See Langton (2002) for a brilliant description of the implication of death, embodiment and emplacement in these cultural landscapes in eastern Cape York Peninsula as an example of the issues to be negotiated by traditional landowners seeking to take on such roles. Trigger (1997) offers a wider account of these issues, drawing on his experience at the Century Zinc mine. Kim Doohan's current PhD research on the Argyle Diamond mine also addresses this issue in considerable detail. The importance of negotiating powerful presences in the landscape and taking care to address such issues, for example by introducing newcomers using various rituals, is a very real responsibility for many Aboriginal people in multicultural NRM systems.