This course includes an even balance of overseas and New Zealand-based cases, so is relevant for both international and domestic students and for students from or outside the School of Environment. It emphasises long-form, written assessments and active engagement with academic literature and concepts, so prospective enrollees should consider their capacity for that type of work.
The course unpacks the idea of participatory management with an analysis of three interventions:
Comanagement and community-based management - Classes will consider the appropriateness of comanagement as a vehicle for addressing indigenous peoples’ grievances in relation to the conservation estate. Sessions include case studies from both successful and stalled collaborative projects in New Zealand, with particular emphasis on Maori involvement in national park planning. Modifications of comanagement, including its application within rights-of-nature approaches and adaptive management, are evaluated against the benchmarks of indigenous rights, environmental justice and community wellbeing.
Community-based environmental management - ‘Regulating’ landowners may yield short-term advantages, but in the long-term it may generate a wide range of unexpected consequences, including non-compliance or avoidance of the active management which is required to maintain environments. The module will also include evaluation of decentralisation to communities within natural resource management. What are the risks and benefits of transferring responsibility for environmental outcomes from state managers to those who use directly natural resources? Case studies include Integrated Catchment Management, devolution to community care groups and community-based restoration.
Sustainable use and social learning - Sustainable use of natural resources introduces a range of new research and informational needs. Collaboration between agency scientists and local communities or indigenous peoples has been promoted as a basis for reconciling formal and local knowledge. Lectures explore both the potential and the dilemmas in this approach with reference to indigenous land claim settlements which have reauthorised cultural harvests and heeded indigenous ecological knowledge but have seldom addressed indigenous developmental needs. The course ends with some enlightening examples of where genuine attempts to reconcile development and environmental enhancement have proved successful for both resource protection and local development.