School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemExperts don't know everything: Governance issues associated with transport and disadvantage( 2007)Public transport planning in an urban context has a relatively straightforward objective: maximise public transport patronage, in order to minimise the economic costs of road traffic congestion and the environmental damage associated with particulate and greenhouse gas emissions. To a large extent, this can be addressed by ‘experts’ using a range of technical skills such as demand forecasting, service planning and contracting.However, rather than patronage growth or modal shift, the objective of public transport provision in rural and regional areas is usually to address social disadvantage.This objective is not effectively achieved using a rationalist ‘expert’ model of decision-making, as the relevant information and resources required to develop solutions are diffuse. Without reference to other sources of knowledge, traditional transport data will provide only limited capacity to determine where transport services are ‘needed’. The full suite of knowledge required to adequately address social disadvantage resides with local communities, networks, institutions and actors. It is the way this knowledge is harnessed that will ultimately determine the success of any strategy in addressing social disadvantage – governance is at the heart of any attempt to respond to social disadvantage.In rural transport, it is not just the knowledge that is diffuse. Rather the assets and other resources needed to implement the solutions are often beyond the control of government, and in the hands of autonomous actors driven by a range of motives. The local school bus might be under contract with the government, but the taxi service operates independently as a small business, the community buses are operated by local agencies, and volunteer transport depends on local goodwill. In Victoria, in an attempt to address transport disadvantage, radical new governance approaches have been trialled through the Transport Connections program. In this program, local partnerships w
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ItemCommunity strength, innovation and learning: new evidence from Victoria( 2007)This paper investigates the role played by networks in learning regions. In particular, it explores the relationship between community strength and innovation in regional Victoria, Australia. The literature on innovation is increasingly pointing to the important role played by local and regional governance mechanisms in driving innovation. The effectiveness of formal structures governing learning regions is underpinned by informal networks. Networks are important as collective learning depends on a continuous flow of information and exchange, and this is built on relationships of stability and trust. Recent Victorian government research presents a unique opportunity to explore the role played by community strength, which can broadly be characterised as the strength of networks. The Victorian Indicators of Community Strength are 14 indicators that provide detailed data at the local government level. To test the theory of a connection between community strength and innovation across regional Victoria, patent data is used as a proxy measure for innovation. This data is then cross-referenced with various social and economic data sets, including the indicators of community strength. The analysis shows that among regional Local Government Areas in Victoria 56% of the variation in the patent rate can be explained by the combination of population density, tertiary education rates and various indicators of community strength, whereas just 23% of the variation in the patent rate can be explained by population density and tertiary education rates alone. Independent of population density and tertiary education levels, there is a statistically significant correlation between the number of patents registered per capita and several of the indicators of community strength. In particular, there is a significant positive correlation between the patent rate and the percentage of the population who are members of an organised group.