Ruth Beilin

• PhD
• Professor at University of Melbourne

In this paper we examine and critique adaptive management (AM) practices for protected areas (PAs), in pursuit of practices that can account for more-than-human relations. Engaging with empirical research from Australian PAs, we reflect on the formation of PAs as “exceptional places” where Nature is implicitly/explicitly to be controlled. We find t...

Sustainable landscape development (SLD) has received much attention worldwide as a concept, linking landscape and sustainability science in spatial planning, landscape design and management. Using the Třeboň Basin in the Czech Republic as a case study – a landscape characterised by an artificial system of 460 fishponds – we explore the relationship...

Implications • Climate change will affect the seasonal production and quality of pastures for livestock feed, and adaptation to these changes is required. Systems adaptation in pasture-based livestock production will require changes to production systems and new skills in the industry workforce. • We argue that transdisciplinary research approaches...

Amidst an increasingly complex global environment of trade and travel, with heightened concerns for the unintended or deliberate spread of species and diseases, biosecurity is a key policy goal in many parts of the world. In Australia, there is concern that invasive species (plants, animals, and diseases) enter, spread, and establish, threatening l...

Adaptation to climate change is increasingly advocated as we approach a 1.5 °C future. Policy-makers emphasise that the required transformation begins with local action. Yet, there is a gap in understanding why local action can remain largely locked-in to maladaptive cycles, with variable on-ground evidence of transformative change. Using ‘the poli...

This paper explores the policy concept and community enactments of ‘shared responsibility’ for disaster resilience in the context of wildfires in Victoria, Australia. Since the state-wide Black Saturday fires of 2009, we contend, first, the State’s decreasing ability to protect its citizens has shifted the responsibility for adapting to uncertainty...

While Australian government agencies are increasingly emphasizing the need to “build community resilience” to bushfires, communities in many rural landscapes have a strong history of actively managing fire risk, in particular through involvement in volunteer fire brigades. This paper explores social-ecological memory, social learning, and adaptatio...

This research explores the complex interplay among (a) landscape and social memory, (b) the construction of place-identity, and (c) notions of responsibility sharing in hazard preparedness and response. Our aims are to (a) establish greater clarity about the gap between social responses to technologically driven risk management strategies favoured...

In this chapter, we present Tarerer/Kelly Swamp. This swamp is located in south-west Victoria, Australia. It is a local landscape and the location and place for our illustration of ‘adaptive doing’, described in subsequent chapters. We begin this chapter with the everyday, and the usual textbook way, of describing a social ecological system. Throug...

In this chapter, we bring together the literature from many disciplines to argue for a focus on practice. We begin by examining the embedded assumptions in the language of social ecological systems (SES) research, including the meanings attributed to words like nonlinearity. We then consider the necessity of critical reflection for integrating diff...

In this chapter, we introduce ‘adaptive doing’, a practice-centred approach that draws on critical reflection and conscientisation to consider how and what individuals do when faced with changing contexts and uncertainty. Putting practice first encourages alternative ways of seeing, knowing and doing, and can assist integration of rational, empiric...

In this chapter, we illustrate the four phases of the ‘adaptive doing’ process, including our engagement in the agora (described in Chapter 4) to reach a new shared understanding of Tarerer/Kelly Swamp. We discuss the triggers for entering the agora and preparations for being in that space. We apply three reframing tools that foster critical reflec...

propose and illustrate ‘adaptive doing’, a practice-oriented process for integrating research in SES;

Aimed at those at the forefront of social ecological thinking, this book presents a practice-oriented process to navigate the complex, interdisciplinary challenges of our time. The book brings together insights from the social sciences and beyond to introduce readers to ‘adaptive doing’ - a continuous and iterative process of experiential learning...

Adaptive management (AM) is one of the most prominent ways ecologists contribute to ecosystem management, policy, and planning. AM treats management actions as experiments to monitor and learn from, creating a central role for ecologists in constructing the monitoring programs intended to guide learning. Yet, ecologists have found monitoring for AM...

The reality of climate change, and the expectation that agricultural production systems will need to adapt in response to it are now largely accepted by the Australian agricultural policy community. However, the effect of Australia’s market-oriented agricultural policy is to delink the matter of adaptation from questions of Australian food security...

Responding to increased frequency and severity of bushfires, Australian governments called for “shared responsibility” for bushfire preparation and mitigation. This requires engagement between all sectors of community—government agencies, businesses, not-for-profit, and residents. Fire management agencies remain concerned about whether all communit...

Investigation approach to migrants adaptation process in host countries has always been placed specific, in order to understand the whole connections to all aspect of life. In Melbourne, community gardens have been a place where immigrants start their interaction with others. The literature argues that the gardens can foster social inclusion, while...

With climate change and increasing globalisation of trade and travel, the risks presented by invasive pests and pathogens to natural environments, agriculture and economies have never been greater, and are only increasing with time. Governments world-wide are responding to these increased threats by strengthening quarantine and biosecurity. This bo...

Farm managers and owners in Australia will increasingly need to rethink their farm Abstract: management in response to a range of possible decision triggers including greater seasonal variability, exposure to extreme weather events, volatile global commodity markets and dynamic workforces. Farmer participation in climate change adaptation research...

Conference theme 12: Adaptation in rural, regional or remote Australia. Abstract The Australian dairy industry has been on an intensification pathway over recent decades, utilising higher levels of inputs to produce milk, however this pathway has been questioned in light of projections for warmer and more variable future climates. 'Dairy businesses...

In order to understand the social and ecological history of apple growing, we undertook historical research, drawing upon in-depth interviews with apple growers to explore local and historic knowledge as well as to obtain an understanding of contemporary growing practices and decision-making among orchardists. The research shows that all apple orch...

In response to Simon and Randall, article’s focus on the ‘ontological politics of resilience multiple’, we articulate the ethics of care and possibility associated with multiple ‘ontologies of responsibility’. We argue that these inform the practices of resilience and underpin social and environmental justice in a perpetual present.

The resilience perspective has emerged as a plausible approach to confront the increasingly devastating impacts of disasters; and the challenges and uncertainty climate change poses through an expected rise in frequency and magnitude of hazards. Stakeholder participation is posited as pivotal for building resilience, and resilience is not passive;...

There is growing recognition that routine climate change framing is insufficient for addressing the challenges presented by this change, and that different framings of climate change shape stakeholders' practices and guide policy options. This research investigated how stakeholders conceptualise climate change in terms of its seriousness and relate...

The research investigated understandings of risk and resilience in emergency management (EM) policy and practice. The core findings illustrate how a complex of institutionalised socio-cultural expectations and standardised processes – that is, evidence-based response models to deal with and communicate uncertainty – influence the operationalisation...

Building on the scientific literature, this article first summarises the socio-environmental impacts of land-use change expected to occur in high amenity Australian peri-urban areas, involving in particular, the effects of land development on agriculture, biodiversity, landscape character, bushfire risk and social factors. Second, the current spati...

This paper outlines the rationale for a research focus on how meaning emerges from the interfaces between research, policy, and practice. In exploring where different constructions of risk, resilience, and landscape occur in the policy and practice discourses surrounding current developments in Victorian bushfire policy, this paper goes beyond simp...

This article explores how macroeconomic and environmental policies instituted since the 1990s have altered meanings, imaginaries, and the human relationship to nature in Colombia. The Colombian nation-state is pluri-ethnic, multilingual, and megabiodiverse. In this context, indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians, and some peasant communities survive h...

Gender is seminal to agrobiodiversity management, and inequities are likely to be exacerbated under a changing climate. Using in-depth interviews with farmers and officials from government and non-government organizations in Nepal, we explore how gender relations are influenced by wider socio-economic changes, and how alterations in gender relation...

The sustainability of local landscapes is subject to multiple interpretations of what it is to be ‘sustainable’, at what scale and in whose terms. In the face of global economic pressures for production, extraction and tourism, our attention is drawn to how we can re-imagine and conceptualise the local with a lens that integrates culture-production...

IntroductionResearchers and practitioners with an interest in a holistic conception of landscape argue for more deliberate approaches to plan, develop and manage landscapes (e.g. Beilin et al. 2012; Bohnet 2008; Dramstad and Fjellstad 2011, 2013; Musacchio 2009, 2013; Pearson and McAlpine 2010; Potschin and Haines-Young 2006; Tress et al. 2003; Wu...

There is urgency afoot to acknowledge the disconnection between ecological realities and the persistence of past ways of constructing the social, as if it is in isolation from the ecological. The urban is the common ground: an endlessly burgeoning, frequently contested home to spaces, institutions and people. ‘Governing for urban resilience’ brings...

This research is novel as not only investigated how stakeholders frame, but also make sense, of resilience in the context of disaster management and climate change.•Stakeholders interviewed construct the meaning of resilience differently and even in contradictory ways, embedded in diverse storylines.•Self-reliance emerged as one of the paramount di...

At a national policy level, Australian governments have embraced the notion of shared responsibility between agencies and communities for disaster resilience, including bushfire. Emergency management agencies take an asset-based approach to management based on an assumption that valued places can be quantified by cataloguing individual ‘things’ in...

As farmers continue to face increasingly uncertain and often rapidly changing conditions related to markets, climate or the policy environment, people involved in agricultural research, development and extension (RD&E) are also challenged to consider how their work can contribute to supporting farmer resilience. Research from the social sciences co...

In recent decades we have witnessed a diversification of rural communities, where the agricultural sector has had to increasingly compete with other interests and demands on rural land. Land management agencies have recognised that in order to resolve sustainability dilemmas, it is important to bring the diverse stakeholders together to negotiate t...

The food security discourse has shifted from a narrow focus on food supply to a greater consideration of access, entitlements and sustainability. An emphasis on vulnerability has coincided with increased recognition that the causes of food insecurity are the result of a complex interaction between ecological, social, political and economic events a...

This study investigated how the meaning of ‘home’ influences the social construction of bushfire in two Australian communities at high risk. An increasing number of Australians are living in proximity to areas of high bushfire risk due to climate, vegetation and demographic changes. Land and Fire Management Agencies recognise an urgent need to unde...

To inform future investment the Australian dairy industry must fully explore the impacts of climate extremes and a more variable climate. Using three dairy businesses in differing regions, a range of farm development options will be explored – some options will push the boundaries of current farming practice, but all will retain economic and social...

Farmland abandonment is changing rural landscapes worldwide, but its impacts on biodiversity are still being debated in the scientific literature. While some researchers see it as a threat to biodiversity, others view it as an opportunity for habitat regeneration. We reviewed 276 published studies describing various effects of farmland abandonment...

The Australian dairy industry has put significant effort into exploring the potential impacts of climate change, however four key limitations remain: 1. Climate change is only one of many drivers that influence the dairy business, other economic and social drivers must also be considered in any system analysis. 2. Current (rather than future) farmi...

Purpose – To confront the increasingly devastating impacts of disasters and the challenges that climate change is posing to disaster risk management (DRM) there is an imperative to further develop DRM. The resilience approach is emerging as one way to do this, and in the last decade has been strongly introduced into the policy arena, although it is...

This research studied factors that residents of a fire-prone Victorian community used when deciding whether to leave their homes on a day officially declared “Catastrophic,” the highest Fire Danger Rating. Taking a social constructivist perspective, we explore how the expert view of bushfire risk, represented by Fire Danger Ratings, is interpreted...

This research considers ideas about local knowledge and place for firefighters during a bushfire. In 2012, we interviewed 68 Australian bushfire firefighters from selected agencies and volunteer brigades in diverse localities. The findings from the interviews indicate local knowledge can help firefighters to navigate tracks and understand fire beha...

Resources of many kinds are shared within social networks, including knowledge of innovations. Knowledge transfer is 'sticky' when it requires significant effort to share and also when the knowledge itself and social processes relating to it are complex, such as when there are many stakeholders involved. The focus of this study is to create underst...

In this paper, the peri-urban is conceptualised as a territory to analyse the tensions associated with governments pursuing various agendas in isolation from those inha-biting these spaces. Two peri-urban vignettes are drawn together and Taylor's con-ception of a 'social imaginary' is used to recognise the conundrum for government planners, as well...

Melbourne, Australia is a city rich in biodiversity. It contains a high proportion of open space and supports a large number of fl ora and fauna species, both indigenous to the region and introduced from around the world. The high levels of biodiversity are partly the result of historical planning decisions that did not deliberately consider biodiv...

I opened this book to a flood of memories associated with being a young garden designer, studying horticulture science at a Canadian university in the 1970s. We design students were permitted to draw in the studios with landscape architecture students in their new Landscape Architecture course. These hours were about art and style and if anyone had...

Community based natural resource management groups contribute to landscape scale ecological change through their aggregation of local ecological knowledge. However, the social networks at the heart of such groups remain invisible to decision makers as evidenced in funding cuts and strategic policy documents. Our research is a pilot study of the soc...

Community gardens programs for social housing in Melbourne are part of attempts to engage immigrants in urban activities. The literature argues that the gardens provide space for migrants to meet other people and thus foster social inclusion, while at the same time providing space to preserve their cultural identity. This paper will investigate the...

Reshaping Environments: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sustainability in a Complex World draws together a team of specialist authors from disciplines including urban planning, social sciences, engineering and environmental science to examine the diverse influences humans have upon the natural environment. This interdisciplinary approach presents...

Victorian farmers have experienced significant impact from climate change associated with drought and more recently flooding. These factors form a convergence with a complex of other factors to change production systems physically; and farmers’ decision making is variously described as adaptive or maladaptive to these drivers of change. Recently up...

In 2007, a study titled 'Living in the landscapes of the 21st century' was conducted in 11 high schools in metropolitan and rural Victoria. The research team investigated Year 10 students' conceptions of landscapes in order to explore their understandings of natural resource management (NRM), including agriculture, food, land and water management....

Extension and communication needs amongst small-scale pig producers, described as pig producers with less than 100 sows, have been previously identified. These producers, who are believed to pose a biosecurity risk to commercial livestock industries, are characterized by a lack of formal networks, mistrust of authorities, poor disease reporting beh...

Climate change and peak oil will have profound impacts on food pro-duction across the world. This article uses selected documents from the agri-culture policy arena to explore international, national and local scale responses and recommendations. Using two regional Australian case-studies, we describe local farming practice. We find that while seek...

This study examines the application of a qualitative Ecological Risk Assessment (ERA) tool to initiate management planning and community engagement in newly legislated Marine Protected Areas. Scientists and the agency expected the participatory element to increase the legitimacy of management by achieving consensus about management priorities as we...

Since Agenda 21, local governments have sought ways of engaging urban citizens in the creation of more sustainable cities. Community garden (CG) activities are frequently described as contributing positively to the development of socially and environmentally sustainable local communities, yet a suitable set of indicators for valuing these benefits...

This article presents a straightforward and highly participatory methodology for addressing government agencies’ concerns with effective communication strategies for biosecurity when stakeholders are diverse and there is uncertainty about their levels of knowledge. The case study was among peri‐urban landholders in an area where serious animal dise...

We focus on the decision to include PNS in the curriculum for a first year tertiary environments degree. Building on case studies that described complex environmental issues, we understood PNS actions to require a critical gaze at our disciplines and then a process for change. We used the idea of disrupting—or interrupting—the established ways of r...

The environment poses many ‘wicked problems’ that cannot be addressed from a single disciplinary perspective. In a research-oriented university, it is a challenge to overcome discipline boundaries to create different pathways for thinking and teaching about the environment. This vignette reflects on two strands, performance and academic culture, in...

In the Cardamom Ranges (Cambodia) community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is proposed by the international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) community as a natural resource management strategy to achieve the targeted outcomes associated with the protected area (PA) management plan. Local people are expected to participate in CBNRM p...

The future of Landcare in Victoria was discussed by Landcare members at the Victorian Landcare Forum in 2004, 2006 and 2008, incorporating the International Landcare Conference in 2006. Emergent themes – such as climate change, drought, changing demographics, new government policy and the evolution of the Victorian Landcare movement (The State of V...

Resources of many kinds are shared within social networks, including knowledge of innovations. Knowledge transfer is 'sticky' when it requires significant effort to share and also when the knowledge itself and social processes relating to it are complex, such as when there are many stakeholders involved. The focus of this study is to create underst...

Post-modern theorists have challenged the totalizing and unifying ambitions of change management practices. This paper explores how a narrative action research approach may be used to combine our modernist commitment to facilitate change and collaboration in the land management context with a post-modern sensitivity to complexity and difference. It...

A new form of Ecological Risk Assessment aims to improve environmental decision-making through strong stakeholder engagement, often in workshop situations. This wider focus increases interaction between workshop practitioners and stakeholders for reflecting on, and learning from, each others perceptions. In this article, we analyse and discuss a on...

Management responsibilities for the system of marine national parks and sanctuaries declared in Victoria, Australia in 2002 have created imperatives for robust, scientifically defendable approaches to identifying threats to valued ecological attributes of the parks, setting management priorities, and developing monitoring systems. We are developing...

This paper focuses on the complex ways in which local farmers and their families create and build their understanding of resilience within their landscapes; how resilience emerges currently in a spectrum of local and global relationships; and, ultimately, how an awareness of the ecological underpinnings in the construction of landscapes presents an...

The declaration in 2002 of a complete system of marine national parks and marine sanctuaries in Victoria created imperatives for robust, scientifically defendable approaches to identifying threats to valued ecological attributes of the parks, setting management priorities and developing monitoring systems. We developed an inclusive and transparent...

The public policy process in Australia is changing towards a more interactive, collaborative model, where governments seek to develop partnerships with civil society and private sector organisations to manage complex policy challenges. This article discusses research conducted into a project implemented by a Victorian government department that sou...

This paper explores a photo-elicitation study with farmers in the steeply degraded hill country of south-eastern Australia. The photographers are the participating family farmers in the study. Their efforts to explain and to change their farming practice are linked to their relationship to the landscape, to the local Landcare conservation groups an...

This paper describes two case studies in which farmers, as the result of group extension programs associated with adult education and action learning cycles, implicitly and explicitly are held to have the responsibility for transferring group experiences to farmer networks outside the immediate group. The case studies look at both community-based a...

The South Atlantic Quarterly 98.4 (1999) 761-779 It is a windy day in the Strzelecki Ranges. On a walk with a group of farmers in the southwest Gippsland dairy country of Victoria, Australia, we have progressed along the new plantations and across the pastures to a lookout point atop the highest hill on one of the farms. One hundred and fifty years...

The people of the Torres Strait suffer a disproportionate level of diet-related disease, especially diabetes. The Torres Strait Health Strategy identified the difficulty in obtaining healthy food, particularly fruit and vegetables, as a major problem for people living in the Torres Strait. This study examined traditional plant food supply systems a...

The people of the Torres Strait suffer a disproportionate level of diet-related disease, especially diabetes. The Torres Strait Health Strategy identified the difficulty in obtaining healthy food, particularly fruit and vegetables, as a major problem for people living in the Torres Strait. This study examined traditional plant food supply systems a...

Farmers grapple with production mandates that restrict their ability to integrate conservation zones within their land management practices. This study was conducted to develop a participatory method for farmers to analyse their landscapes in relation to production and conservation values. A photo elicitation method was used, whereby local Landcare...

The metaphor of 'sliding doors,' adapted from an American film of the same name, provides the starting point in this paper that considers the need for capacity building within extension services, as well as in the rural communities serviced by extension practitioners. The theoretical differences between two case studies in two sectors of the natura...

For an effective 'non-coercive' change to more sustainable forms of agriculture a distinction between instrumental, strategic and communicative rationality in the use of intervention is required. This research focuses on identifying how the complex decision making associated with multiple extension intervention initiatives leads to change in water...

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