Steve Garlick

Possumwood Wildlife Recovery and Research and the University of Technology Sydney

Higher education has provided little leadership and few conceptual tools to assist us to better understand our place, among others, in leading the world towards a more sustainable future. We continue to educate society in ways oblivious to the mounting crisis of unsustainability (Orr 1992). Instead, our universities reinforce human exceptionalism i...

Universities have historically generated knowledge outside of specific local contexts. These pure research methodologies produce knowledge that is carefully partitioned from the practical realities of a phenomenon. This book suggests a world in peril requires us to question this approach, particularly in the field of environmental sustainability. E...

While it is accepted that there are 'sensitive' and 'critical' periods of life during which certain human capabilities are more readily acquired, and where the multiplied returns on our investment in human capability building are more significant, it is also argued that there are place-based contexts (society, nature, culture, economy) that are sen...

This paper reports on research into wildlife emotion, interpretation and usefulness as a means for broad-scale learning about environmental sustainability. Part of the Australian landscape for 16 million years, the iconic kangaroo has characteristics that make them suited, as wild animals, for humans to learn about environmental integrity. A ‘new w...

Wildlife objectification and cruelty are everyday aspects of Australian society that eschew values of human kindness, empathy, and an understanding of the uniqueness and importance of non-human life in the natural world. Fostered by institutional failure, greed and selfishness, and the worst aspects of human disregard, the objectification of animal...

This paper explores how an ideal relational ethic based on Zygmunt Bauman’s (1995) notion of forms of togetherness is needed to underpin university-community engagement processes and practices. We focus on the notion of being-for, and suggest that it can be used as an ‘engagement bridge’ between higher education institutions, the creation of human...

This article provides the background and describes the processes involved in establishing a national approach to benchmarking the way universities engage with their local and regional communities in Australia. Local and regional community engagement is a rapidly expanding activity in Australian public universities and is increasingly being seen as...

As the knowledge economy develops and intensifies, increasing pressure is being placed on universities to help in local economic capacity building to meet the challenges of globalization. This article explores this expanded university role from the perspective of the provision of policy analysis and advice they can provide. It proposes the use of m...

"An Enterprising Approach to Regional Growth: Implications for Policy and the Role of Vocational Education and Training" explores patterns of regional economic growth in Australia over the period 1984 to 2002 with the aim of identifying the drivers of variation in regional growth; the research also aimed to identify regional opportunities and the p...

Used findings from studies of exemplary knowledge-based partnerships between universities and communities in Australia to report on effective practices, benefits to the community and campus, and implications for higher education policy. (SLD)

Rural adjustment is part of the wider spectrum of structural adjustment that is occurring within the Australian economy. The government has set in place macro policies to speed up the country' integration into the world economy, but getting the big numbers right still leaves important local and regional issues to come to grips with.

This paper describes an emerging new project area that engages the enterprising capacity of an active ageing population to achieve a range of personal, institutional, regional and national objectives through processes of learning and innovation. The Sunshine Coast and Wide Bay regions of Queensland are taken as case studies for the project as they...

Steve has more than twenty years experience in the field of regional development. He was a senior executive in the Commonwealth Government for around twelve years and was one of the key architects of the former Government's regional development policy and strategy released in the 1994 white paper Working Nation. Steve has been a professor at Southe...

This paper examines how low relative economic growth and high service and infrastructure costs in non-metropolitan regions that are increasingly attractive to lifestyle-seeking seniors, can be offset by focussing more positively on the human capital dimension of this cohort through closer engagement with higher education learning and innovation. At...