'Raising the bar': The role of institutional frameworks for community engagement in Australian natural resource governance

- Natural resource governance struggles with best scale for rural decision-making.
- Routine reform challenges community engagement in rural decision-making.
- Governance innovations can increase community engagement.
- Institutional frameworks need to balance accountability against participation.
- Best practice standards and audit procedures can change community engagement norms.

Australian natural resource governance has recently embarked on a new round of regional experimentation. One decade after regional natural resource management bodies were established in response to ideals of devolution and subsidiarity, political commitments to 'localism' have resulted in a paradoxical shift to bigger regional boundaries, and an apparent retreat from values of environmental conservation. A retreat from government funded public good natural resource management has seen a growth in ideals of market instruments and an economic paradigm of productivity and profit begin to dominate. A long held divide between conservation and production landscape values has seen community engagement emerge as the battleground of rural environmental policy.Through two qualitative case studies of community governance mechanisms this paper examines how one Australian jurisdiction has responded to these challenges. Findings include a valuable role for best practice standards and compliance requirement in driving new norms of community engagement; a difficult balance between accountability and innovation in implementing community governance; and significant disruption caused by regular cycles of reform. Recommendations include developing community skills for participatory governance and the development of negotiated accountability frameworks that support rural governance innovation.