“Liberating” social knowledges for water management, and more broadly environmental management, through “place-change planning”

Abstract

In response to the big policy problem of increasing failures of traditional, largely technical, policy approaches to constructively address transformational or radical socio-environmental problems from major facility siting, landscape modification, and/or new environmental management at the local level, this paper introduces “place-change planning”. This concept is applied to recent calls by Australian water scientists and policy-makers “to liberate the knowledge, skills and individual leadership and collaboration of all stakeholders to reflect a more decentralised, disaggregated and localised water world”. Local community stakeholders appear the most neglected stakeholder currently in such water management, despite increasing international recognition of their importance for constructive change in transitional sustainability contexts. As such, place-change policy design focuses on the importance of collaborative participatory approaches for better understanding of the underlying rationalities, and, by association, of better liberating the social knowledges, of place-based local communities for better policy input to realise new visions of sustainable water management, and beyond.

Keywords:

• place-change
• planning
• social knowledges
• community engagement
• water and environmental management

Notes

The Basin comprises large swathes of the Australian States of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. It features 23 river valleys and accounts for 40% of Australia's agricultural production and 60% of Australia's irrigated agricultural production (MDBA 2010b, p. 8). In December 2008, against a long history of poor water management, the MDBA emerged as the first single agency responsible for planning integrated management of the water resources of the MDB (Eggins et al. 2005, MDBA 2010a, p. 3).

Smith (2003, p. 361) highlights the need for support to address financial capacity constraints on bottom-up inputs. Communities may hold valuable knowledge about local environments and be enthusiastic and motivated to engage but need “more than the mobilization of community members” to contribute input for “successful and sustainable water management … ”. That is, material resources are critical for local communities to engage adequately, especially rural ones, which often lack such resources.