Social and economic information for NRM

Product Information

Natural resources are managed by people. Understanding the needs, capacities and motivations of Australia’s land managers is critical to designing sound policy and program interventions and evaluating their impact at both the national and regional scale. It is widely acknowledged that the condition of the natural resource base, a land manager’s socio-demographic characteristics and management practices, enterprise financial status and the level of social capital in a community/industry are interdependent.

Socio-economic information plays an important role in NRM decision making by:

• providing context to regional planning through enhanced understanding of baseline social and economic conditions and processes which impact upon a region’s capacity for NRM,
• enhancing understanding of the social and economic impacts of particular interventions, noting that impacts can be positive or negative and unevenly distributed in the community,
• contributing to the monitoring and evaluation of the effectiveness of NRM interventions, and
• informing the assumptions which underpin major policy initiatives, particularly in relation to the decision making behaviour of individuals, families and firms.

The above uses have been incorporated within the context of the NAP/NHT program logic to identify the types of questions facing decision makers that can be answered using socio-economic information.

A review of the current MEWG socio-economic indicators notes that there is a need for better clarity in terms of the questions they will be used for, consistency in the hierarchical level they seek to provide information on, coverage over the range of uses of socio-economic information, and that they would benefit from the collection of qualitative data to support the interpretation of numerical data. Further consideration of a broader range of data collection methodologies (such as case studies, focus groups, and interviews) is required to answer a number of questions, particularly those relating to capacity building within regional groups.

The paper also highlights that there are a number of gaps in the availability of socio-economic information for decision making at a national and regional level, and proposes an option for data collection that can be tailored to specific regions (eg. NAP regions), based upon existing collections, while the refinement of the framework and indicators is undertaken and new collection vehicles are considered.