Institutional complexity and environmental management: the challenge of integration and the promise of large-scale collaboration

Abstract

Abstract Integration has become something of a byword for those concerned with environmental planning and management in Australia in recent years. Yet efforts to collaborate with non-state actors in policy development and implementation, and to co-ordinate local, state and federal government policies and activities suggest that integration can become an amorphous and often ambiguous goal. This article draws on recent collaborative and co-ordination efforts to address water quality issues in Queensland's Great Barrier Reef region to highlight some of these challenges. A preliminary assessment shows how a Reef-wide collaborative water quality partnership has risen to the challenge of integration. To date, this large-scale collaboration has focussed on co-ordinating a defensible knowledge-base to guide water quality management responses and developing an adaptive management strategy to test this knowledge through management experience and monitoring feedbacks. An initial evaluation of these efforts suggests the value of 'scaling-up' collaboration to facilitate integrated environmental management. There is no 'hard-wired' or structural solution to the problem on integration; instead, this experience shows that the development of collaborative partnerships also holds great promise. Such partnerships need to be carefully fitted to the particular management contexts in which integration is being pursued. Keywords: integrationinstitutionscollaborationenvironmental management