| | Over the past 10 years, a ‘desert knowledge’ movement has grown up in inland Australia, in which organisations including Desert Knowledge Australia and the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre (DKCRC) are seeking to define a more prosperous, united and sustainable future for the region. Their work is founded partly on the presumption that there are several features that make desert Australia (and, indeed, drylands elsewhere in the world) different from the temperate regions in which most of the history of development of our science, our management practices and our administration has taken place in the past and continues to do so today.
Desert Knowledge developments have been founded around three major pillars that must respond to desert drivers – desert livelihoods, desert settlements and regions, and desert social capital. The linkages between these elements are logical – without livelihoods, no-one will live in the desert; even with livelihoods, no-one will stay without appropriate settlements and their services, and these need to be linked into functional regions; and nothing will happen at all without people and institutions to take up the opportunities. Accordingly, this Special Issue of 'The Rangeland Journal' is arranged around these themes, after an introductory discussion of the broad drivers of desert regions in Australia.
Desert drivers: the first four papers address the special features of desert Australia and their consequences for the underlying drivers of biophysical and social function.
Desert livelihoods theme: the next group of papers extends the concept of livelihoods from a focus on work (a ‘9-to-5’ job in western economic terms) to include such factors as health and wellbeing, and pluri-activity where performing a range of jobs may become the norm.
Sustainable desert settlements theme: this section shifts the emphasis upwards in human scale from individual livelihoods to communities and settlements.
Desert social capital theme: the final section is introduced by McAllister et al. (2008) in another conceptual paper that explores the nature of networks in sparse and variable populations; they highlight a series of hypotheses, credibly supported but not formally tested by evidence, around the degree to which the strength and numbers of network links may differ from more densely populated environments, with implications for social capital, business networks and governance.
As a whole, these papers represent a valuable but partial scan through the scope of work emerging from the Desert Knowledge community. | |
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