School of BioSciences - Theses

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    Management structures of Tiwi indigenous landowners and responses to changing resource values
    Hicks, John Sydney ( 2015)
    The Tiwi people of northern Australia have managed their land and natural resources continuously for 6000–8000 years. The elegance of traditional governance structures and decision making strategies discussed in this thesis illustrates how they did it; how reliable harvests were sustained, and how land and resources were maintained through generations. This study also includes more recent [from 1960] contrasts of post traditional land use highlighting impacts and responses of managers and landowners through their continuing transition from traditional to a market economy. Impacts and responses of this kind readily accord with a focus on social ecological systems and their management which frame the theoretical approach undertaken in this thesis. The reasons for this emerge from the prominence and persistence of Tiwi decision making techniques that influence land management actions and responses. Managers gathering information for their decisions rely upon embedded elements now vulnerable to changing meanings and beliefs. For example, traditional aspirations were attainable through knowledge and monitoring of landscape systems, and access sanctions that assured sustainable harvests. These elements are no longer available to post traditional decision makers. Landowner participation is no longer required to access or harvest resources; and the value of those resources, once a community consumption satisfaction, has been monetised. Achieving aspiration levels continues; the meanings have changed. Governance structures that once supported traditional processes with sanctions and verifications preserving their influence need also adapt to different meanings and beliefs. Impacts shaping social-ecological systems also shape the minds of those people managing them. None more so than monetised resources and rational economics. As task environments change they provide contrasts accentuating responsive Tiwi principles of adaptive management. Impacts can be identified through indicators revealed by these contrasts. Modifying the effects of impacts requires decisions for the use and management of developed land focus on the resilience of landscapes; be open to scientific collaboration to achieve it, and set within transparent and legitimate own governance structures. We provide a framework of indicators to reference Tiwi responses in these categories. Each category is touched by aspirations of land owners and managers asserting their own controls through Tiwi decision strategies. They are strategies that exploit the structure and attributes of the environment within which decision(s) are made. Aspirations change when a changed environment alters the categories of benefits sought from land resources. Decision strategies are then open to attributes of a new environment accommodating values of rational economics. Where aspirations once satisfied immediate resource needs they contained attributes capable of delivering long term sustainable resource management. Tiwi aspirations can no longer be relied upon to achieve those outcomes. By evaluating the relationship between changing land use and aspirations to benefit from that use, adaptive management systems can be observed evolving as aspirations change. Indicators are able to capture the changes occurring. They illuminate impacts occurring to Tiwi governance structures and to the principles that governance has relied on. Primarily, traditional governance established aspiration pathways and provided guidance for their attainment. Short cuts to attainment were strictly contained. This significant doctrine enshrining aspiration management techniques remain within traditional memory of the current generation. The capacity of adaptive governance to manage new aspirations by way of revised sanctions and achievement pathways suggests some prescriptions are possible for effective environmental management and conservation of Tiwi land in the longer term.