Landcare shifts ground to regional focus

The National Landcare Conference was held in Darwin in April, hosted by the NT Government and the Tropical Savannas CRC. A first for the tropical savannas, it was an opportunity for north­erners to catch up on the national scene and a chance for a national audience to hear about northern land management. Peter Jacklyn reports.

Changing times | Caring for country | Measuring progress | The final word |

Landcare conference delagates on one of the agricultural tours

The theme of the conference, ‘Respecting values, working and learning together’ related to how people see and value country in different ways but nevertheless need to cooperate. In northern Australia, views of the land take in more than just a ‘city’ and ‘country’ view, but encompass a range of ways of looking at land, many of which are outside of mainstream Landcare. The conference was a chance for these different views to be presented on the same stage.

So how did it all go? For a start, 680 people showed up, making it one of the largest conferences ever held in Darwin—and well done to the volunteers who made such a big event run smoothly. It wasn’t just the lure of the exotic north that drew people, it is also a time of great change in Landcare and many people wanted to get a clearer idea of where the movement is heading.

Changing times

The major funding source for Landcare—the federal government’s Natural Heritage Trust (NHT)—has shifted its focus ¹ . Whereas much of the original NHT (1996–01) was delivered directly to individual community groups, the recent extension to NHT aims to be more strategic and is to be delivered through regional plans.

Michael Taylor, the CEO of the Federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, sees this as a just one step in a process in which there is more integration between sustainable natural resource management (NRM) and the whole of agriculture. His talk outlined the range of NRM initiatives the Government is involved in and how he saw the new regionally focused Landcare as playing a vital role in building partnerships with industry and helping to spread the sustainable NRM message.

However, according to one of the fathers of Landcare, Brian Roberts of Cairns, Landcare is in danger of “losing its soul”, as it is becoming dominated by bureaucracy, local coordinators are burning out and landholders losing their influence. One of the few landholders to speak at the conference, Jenny Blake, spoke of how many farmers are now wary of too much involvement in Landcare because of the workload of paperwork and strategy meetings.

These last talks seemed to strike a chord with many in the audience. Perhaps this year in particular, some Landcarers are feeling the strain as their funding is drying up before it flows again through the new regional plans. In areas where regional plans are taking longer to develop, funding has been slashed—the NT Landcare Council, for example, had its annual funding cut by more than half. Quite a few delegates spoke of being disappointed with some of the politicians and bureaucrats who flew in, said all was well, and flew out again.

Caring for country

This conference had a distinctive focus on Aboriginal land management. Michael Storrs of the Northern Land Council and Cherry Daniels, a women’s ranger from Ngukurr in the NT, spoke of the remarkable Caring for Country movement and the indigenous ranger groups that have sprung up across the NT ² . This indigenous movement seems to be flowering in a way not unlike that of the early Landcare movement.

Nevertheless indigenous caring for country is clearly different from ‘whitefella’ Landcare. Many of the indigenous people felt uncomfortable at the conference and would have preferred their own meeting and such a gathering was proposed at the end of the conference. (It was also proposed at the end of the International Landcare Conference in 2000). Some non-indigenous people, however, were concerned by this, fearing that Landcare could become mired in a cultural conflict between an Aboriginal land-management movement and a non-indigenous one ³ . It looks like this is one area where there is plenty of scope for more working and learning together.

Measuring progress

Another value system that can incite fear is that of the accountant. In one form or another, accountability and evaluation have become key issues for Landcare. Demands of accountability in the spending of Landcare funds have contributed to the increasing paperwork.

Aside from wanting to know how land managers spend government dollars, there is also an increasing pressure for them to demonstrate that they are looking after land appropriately, in a way that can be objectively measured. The growing use of environmental management systems and the newer Australian Landcare Management System that includes local and regional catchment strategies, were discussed. On one hand these debates at the conference seemed to reflect a growing concern that Landcare needs to show more outcomes than the warm and fuzzy feelings of people working together, and needs hard evidence that it is producing results in the landscape. But there is concern that the essence of Landcare—local communities being enabled to work together—is being diluted by the emphasis on bean-counting, strategies and paperwork.

The final word

These were a few of the issues talked over at the conference. So what was gained from the trip north for Landcare? Although the panel discussion at the end of the two days appeared to turn its gaze back to southern issues, the conference did provide a major stage for northern land manage­ment and it was a great place to network with so many delegates. It’s probably too early to measure the conference’s impact as most of the real talk takes place off stage around the lunch tables and bars.

The last word goes to the bloke who stood up on the final day and said “. . . now we’ve been inside for two days a lot of us are itching to get outside and get our hands dirty with Landcare work.”

Many of us have become pretty good at talking about land management over the last few years, but it’s giving effective support to people who actually manage land that counts.