A ThinkTank for Capacity Learnings: Motivating Continued Engagement for Long-Term Natural Resource Management

Bolitho A¹*

1. Department of Sustainability and Environment, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Investment in community engagement and social capacity building through natural resource management agencies at the federal, state and regional level is based on the premise that this will:

• reduce the likelihood of conflict and instability in relationships amongst stakeholders through improved decision-making
• bring more people on board for the longer-term natural resource management effort;
• foster community cohesion.

However, any attempt to marry social and biophysical elements of the triple bottom line, brings together quite different disciplines and values. Program managers and practitioners face contention over definitions, targets and accountability.
This was true of the National Action Plan on Salinity and Water Quality funded ‘Social Capacity Building Project’. The project had a multi-layered ambition: to engage catchment managers in furthering their strategic requirements to engage with communities. The Victorian Catchment Management Authorities initially took a guarded interest in the project, with strong perceptions that the project would provide prescriptive and unrealistic strategies and frameworks, inappropriate to local realities.

Through engaging these stakeholders in a program of shared learning, ‘Thinktank for Capacity Learnings’, the project provided considerable motivation to continue developing relationships and trust across community and different levels of government. It demonstrates that successful stakeholder and community engagement, and capacity building cannot be achieved through single positions or single agencies.

This paper focuses on issues raised in the evaluation of the ThinkTank to show the limits and potentials of community engagement in the policy environment of natural resource management.

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