Jumping Off the Treadmill: Reforming Natural Resource Governing Through Systemic Co-Inquiry

In 2015 a roomful of individuals with backgrounds in farming, environmental volunteering, landscape management and systems research met to explore how to improve governance of natural resource management (NRM) in Victoria, Australia. Why? They had no ‘project’, no funding and no auspice, but they shared a conviction that governance could be better. Together they began a systemic co-inquiry leading to four ongoing activities of innovation in specific aspects of governance. This paper explores the starting conditions for this civic action, outlines the process design considerations and elucidates factors that support continued co-inquiry and co-design. The case study is situated within the broader ‘problematique’ of how to operationalise relational policy and practice development as part of a shift towards systemic/adaptive co-governance. Innovations in public governance reflect the interplay of the global, institutional, social and cultural starting conditions in which they emerge. In this case, there is immense anthropogenic pressure on the Earth, even as people continue to use, extract, and steward ‘natural resources’ such as water, soils, plants and animals. Since the 1980s there have been substantial efforts to respond by reforming NRM in Victoria. Unfortunately, years of innovation in community-government collaboration have failed to develop and embed institutionalised forms of governance that are equitable, systemic and sustained. The systemic failings of NRM governance are due partly to the ‘treadmill effect’, where dysfunctional relations between local participants and government offices/officers stifle opportunity, leading to the same planning and delivery actions being repeated over and over. Failure also results from a ‘pendulum effect’, with funding regimes swinging to initiatives that favour local imperatives, before swinging back to centralised command and control. NRM governance has remained focused on non-adaptive, centrally managed strategies that encourage linguistic gymnastics to mask the lack of real change, and allow consultation to masquerade as participation. Reliance on ‘spin’ and conflation of participation and consultation add to other perceived breaks in trust and respect, and all undermine the legitimacy of authority. Thus, the short answer to why the systemic co-inquiry came to be is that participants were driven by the gravity of the global environmental threat, coupled with years of innovation and engagement without discernable change in governance, topped by the futility of continually chasing the swinging funding pendulum. Lacking government-sponsored ‘spaces’ in Victoria for contesting and co-designing governance, these citizens co-created their own space. In a designed process of five sessions conducted over 16 months, the participants engaged in a systemic co-inquiry; that is, they learnt, designed and enacted change together. The innovation and change emerging from that space required a combination of individual passions, shared willingness to learn and create together, careful facilitation, understandings of theory for design and technique/tool selection, and determination of how government representatives could safely push boundaries. The four emergent co-inquiries, around themes that matter to those participating, are contributing to improved NRM governance in Victoria. They are also informing our meta-inquiry- an on-going systemic co-inquiry as to how best to do systemic/adaptive co-governance of NRM.