School of Geography - Theses

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Type: PhD thesis × Start date: 2000 × Subject: Community development × Author: Pepperdine, Sharon Judith ×

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    Measuring rural community sustainability: the use of social indicators in an adaptive approach to catchment management
    Pepperdine, Sharon Judith ( 2005)
    An understanding of social issues is imperative for effective planning and policy development to foster sustainability. Social sustainability, or well-being, of communities is integral to any assessment of sustainability since it reflects, and impacts upon, ecological and economic sustainability. One area where this has direct implications is the management of natural resources. The catchment, or watershed, has assumed importance as a planning unit for natural resource management (NRM) in Australia. Integrated catchment management (ICM) has widely been adopted for NRM at the catchment scale but is largely confined to biophysical issues. To combat this bias, social issues need to be represented in a format that can be used to assist decision-making. Such feedback can fulfil a range of purposes. In the case of ICM, insight into social conditions can be used to both inform the social context for decision-making and provide feedback on policy and program outcomes, to enable an adaptive approach to catchment management. This thesis was concerned with the development of a system to monitor trends in the social sustainability of rural communities. Several theoretical areas and a multi-staged empirical investigation informed this thesis. In particular, it is ground in the notions of 'community sustainability' and 'social sustainability' that evolved from the discourse on sustainable development; consideration of methodological frameworks for social indicators; and through a case study. The case study draws upon the needs and concerns held by local stakeholders from multiple communities across the Woady Yaloak catchment in rural Victoria, Australia. Through interviews, personal observation and questionnaires, some insight is offered into the social dimensions of community sustainability in a rural context, and a suite of perceptual social indicators were constructed and applied to validate the tool and measure how stakeholders consider the social condition of their communities. A series of social indicators were developed and validated to represent the components of community sustainability in a manageable format that can be quantified. This provides a comprehensive framework of the issues to consider, a mechanism that can be applied to inform the social context for decision-making and the strengths that can be harnessed or the weaknesses that need to be addressed, for planning or policy evaluation, or for sustainability considerations. It is argued that this system of perceptual social indicators is useful to counter the emphasis on objective measures. This system can be used in conjunction with objective measures to provide a broader picture.