Civic Responsibility and the Environment: Linking Local Conditions to Community Environmental Activeness

The Impact of Social Capital on Residential Water-Affecting Behaviors in a Drought-Prone Australian Community

“…Pretty and Ward (2001) present evidence from case studies demonstrating that social capital within rural communities in the third world predicts higher financial yields and sustainable solutions to local development problems, preventing the degradation and overuse of natural resources. In rural Mississippi (USA) utilising Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, census data and snowball sampling of 527 key informants in 208 communities, Parisi et al (2004) identified the predictors of community environmental activeness and concluded that "investment in social capital is a viable strategy to promote civically based environmental initiatives" (p.108). In Australia, Onyx et al (2004) examined the connection between social capital and attitudes towards sustainability in a regional New South Wales community.…”

Spatially bounded regions for resource governance

“…D u r i n g t h e 1 9 9 0 s , a c a d e m i c i n t e r e s t i n p u b l i c participation in natural resource governance has increased markedly (see review by Buchy et al 2000), while theories of 'place' and 'community' have gained increasing empirical support and refined definitions in recent years (Feld and Basso 1996;Wilkinson 2000;Stedman 2003;Cheng et al 2003;Parisi et al 2004). …”

‘Eco-civic’ optimisation: A nested framework for planning and managing landscapes

“…Firstly, the association by the local (human) communities to their natural landscape characterised by particular ecosystems and vegetation. This includes attachment to the visual elements of the landscape and to the resource utilisation by these communities including land use issues, further embedding communities into their landscape through the creation of a cultural (agricultural, urban) landscape (Shannon, 1992(Shannon, , 1998Field et al, 2003;Parisi et al, 2004;Stewart et al, 2004;Terkenli, 2005). Secondly, there are other benefits arising from the management of a relatively homogenous landscape.…”

“…regions, catchment regions, forestry regions) (Power, 1996;Brunckhorst, 2000;Parisi et al, 2004). Novel approaches to defining multi-functional, but characteristic, social-ecological landscapes could provide more efficient and socially appropriate regional frameworks for community and agency engagement in resource governance.…”

“…State and Federal government resource management agencies have had various administrative regions but, in recent decades, attempts have been made to extend this to decision-making bodies based on river catchments (e.g., Cunningham, 1986). Generally, however, these frameworks for resource governance have not achieved effective engagement, integration or action (Omernik and Bailey, 1997;Knight and Landres, 1998;Reeve, 1998;Parisi et al, 2004). They often seem to produce plans that few are interested in implementing, that have been 'captured' by single interests (not representative; small proportion engaged or participating) or that split inter-related issues into multiple single-issue frameworks (e.g., vegetation In recognising the need for a basic 'holistic' region to integrate community interests with ecological characteristics, this project focused on developing a method to identify boundaries that met the three primary expectations of such regional frameworks for more effective resource governance.…”