Effective Community Engagement for Sustainability: Wombat Community Forest Management Case Study

Abstract

The first significant government sponsored community‐based forest management project in Australia was initiated in Central Victoria in 2002. This paper analyses the initial stage of the Wombat Community Forest Management Pilot Project. The paper develops a functional concept of ‘effective community’ for structuring community engagement in these kinds of natural resource management projects. The effective community has characteristics in common with a community of interest, adopts a bioregional perspective, embodies the values of environmental stewardship and interacts in a fully informed way as a ‘discursive community’ (Meppam 2000 Meppam, T. 2000. ‘The discursive community: evolving institutional structures for planning sustainability’, Ecological Economics, 34: 47–61. [Google Scholar]). The paper offers general advice for organising effective community engagement in such projects and 12 recommendations for governments developing similar initiatives elsewhere.