TIME | 14 July 2011, 4pm onwards
LOCATION | CSAFE Seminar Room, , Dunedin
SPEAKER | Professor Helen Ross
Australia is one of a few international pioneers in co-management of natural resources between Indigenous peoples, governments and other parties. Where Canada was seminal in wildlife co-management, Australia’s innovations were in terrestrial protected areas and the declaration and management of Indigenous protected areas. Australia also has interesting initiatives in Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs), through its system of Indigenous Protected Areas. Co-management options have lagged, however, in marine areas and areas where Indigenous people lack formal title to substantial areas of land. This seminar explains Australia’s approaches to co-management of protected areas and IPAs. It then outlines a framework for designing co-management developed through research with Great Barrier Reef Indigenous communities, and outlines some of the strategies used by these communities to develop co-management arrangements despite lack of the usual statutory levers.
Helen Ross is Professor responsible for the social sciences in the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences (and formerly in Integrative Systems), the University of Queensland. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist (environmental psychologist and anthropologist) specialising in community roles in environmental management. Her main research threads are resilience, social-ecological systems, co-management, Indigenous natural resource management, social impact assessment and public participation.
Her recent projects include a study identifying the attributes of social resilience in far North Queensland, and developing indicators for use by environmental managers and regional developers; and a study to guide the development of integrated water resource management in the Pacific. Her new projects include a study of Moreton Bay (south east Queensland) as a social-ecological system, to assist in monitoring of the marine park use and management, and collaboration with Dr Chris Jacobson and others, and Dr Ann Pomeroy and others, in CSAFE projects.
All of her projects are conducted in partnership with communities and/or management organizations. Helen is also the Editor of the Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, and a member of the Australian Psychological Society’s Climate Change Expert Reference Group, and a member of Healthy Waterways Partnerships’s Scientific Experts Panel.