干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Through long-established connections to country, Aboriginal residents are highly committed to sustaining the many natural and cultural values embodied in arid Australia. Many of these lands are in better ecological condition than those in other biomes and provide important conservation opportunities. However, equitable land management partnerships and goals are rarely sustained in large part because there is no widely-accepted planning and evaluation framework to bridge the significant cultural differences in concepts such as land, livelihoods in land, outcomes of livelihood strategies, and sustainable governance of this system across levels.

In this context, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems is working through the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre's Livelihoods inLand (TM) project on cross-cultural participatory modelling of desert Aboriginal livelihoods in land management. This research is examining:

1. evidence for the relationship between natural and cultural resource management and sustainable livelihood outcomes for desert people (including health, well being, and income);

2. evidence for improvements in those outcomes from targeted investments in livelihood activities;

3. differences in people's mental models of livelihoods across sectors and levels.

We are addressing these questions through a stepwise process of developing a cross-cultural conceptual framework to organise data, followed by participatory modelling of the current system and future scenarios using that framework. The intent is to clarify the connections between the models and users' related experiences, categories and concepts, so the model is transparent, can be easily validated, and does not impose one cultural worldview on another.

We identified the sustainable livelihoods framework as having the handful of important functions and interactions needed to describe land-based livelihoods. However, we have needed to modify the category definitions to match local experiences and to enable us to use analytical methods that can incorporate regional and national research data.

We found the system dynamics modelling method most closely matched the conceptual framework of end-users and the livelihood framework. More importantly, it enables us to build models that use the diverse physiological and ecological principles that are impacting human and ecological health, and to integrate qualitative and logical data. We engaged a cross-cultural reference group, and researchers working with Aboriginal communities to help develop this approach, and have used it to assess land management plans and a detailed case study.

We have found sustainable livelihoods is a useful conceptual framework for identifying important interactions among diverse variables. At finer levels of detail, we have found the challenge for participatory cross-cultural modelling is to identify key drivers that can focus diverse local strategies, guide adaptive management, and provide an argument for supportive rules across levels. The multiple levels of analysis involved may require a hierarchical set of models: a conceptual framework, a set of drivers that influence system states, and a set of outcomes that influence drivers.

This approach can help integrate scientific data and local Aboriginal efforts. It has the potential to be the basis of a tool to identify multiple types of investment that can support livelihoods as an integrated system delivering outcomes valued by local groups and the nation.