Feb
2001
We're looking for something that will stimulate people to think outside the constraints of the present (Sarah Ryan)
How
should we think about the task of managing the Division’s research portfolio
over, say, the next 25 years ( a human generation), given that Australia will
change enormously in terms of its landscape/ ecosystem mix and function over
that time; and that these changes will have major quality of life implications
for present and future Australians?
In
the act of asking this question I am implying (a) that the Division should be
thinking about its next 25 years of research and (b) that the Division’s research should mostly be
somewhere in the area of landscape and
ecosystem dynamics. That is a very
broad agenda and within it I would have little trouble locating the bulk of the
Division’s current research. Mind you,
I could locate Star Wars research there too with a dollop of imagination.
Before
thinking about research portfolios, what can we say with some confidence about
this process I am suggesting to be the target of our research agenda?
Over periods as short as decades, landscapes and ecosystems mainly change when land use and management change. With minor exceptions land use change tends to be a one-way street where land use in any landscape/ecosystem moves, in fits and starts, along the spectrum from pristine to heavily urbanised/industrialised (Cocks and Walker 1994). Such changes entail the introduction of exogenous materials and energy flows.
So,
in coming decades, Australian landscapes will see a process of spatially-variable
intensification in land use, one which will be driven by changes in:
·
Market forces
eg growth in primary product exports; growth in inbound tourism; price of
fossil fuels; prospects for new industries
·
Institutional arrangements and social structures
eg the degree of development control exerted by the community over private land
use; devolution of governance
·
Relevant technologies
eg further substitution of capital for labour in resource-based industries;
advances in landscape remediation
·
Population size and distribution
eg immigration into larger cities and displacement of prior population from
these into adjacent coastal areas
·
Secondary changes in landscape and ecosystem processes
eg capture of flow resources(eg sunlight, water) in usable form; degradation and depletion of stock resources (eg
soil loss, biodiversity, minerals).
·
Community values and attitudes
eg a shift in the
consumerism-materialism vs post-materialism tradeoff; support for government as
a vehicle for collective action: preference for a collaborative rather than a
competitive society
Consider the last of these a bit more. Where do community values and attitudes about landscapes and ecosystems come from? They are moulded by a process of public debate on a plethora of issues (issues can be thought of as ‘matters for concern’) including:
Back to the research portfolio problem. But before I can discuss the question of choosing research topics, I need to make a few assumptions about how the Division’s research program is going to be organised.
2. For the purposes of discussion, we might assume that the Division’s research portfolio is organised around 10-12 themes each with a 10-year life. Whatever the right number, it is important to have a critical mass of researchers working on each theme, ie to have a research environment within which researchers have plenty of colleagues around with whom they can discuss their research in detail.
The
core of the research management task then is to select families of
issues, new themes, to replace terminating themes in the Division’s research
portfolio.
There
are many ways of thinking about this task.
One I like is to start with a set of guidelines summarising conditions
that selected themes either must meet or which, less stringently, one would prefer to see met. Then you look for research themes which meet
these guidelines as far as possible.
For example, mandatory or ‘hard’ guidelines which must be met might include:
These three exemplary guidelines simply reflect the fact that no research program can address all landscape/ecosystem issues and that to help avoid being too thinly spread, some families of issues should be excluded a priori. The opportunity cost of working on broad range of issues is that it becomes harder to retain a critical mass of research expertise in all areas.
Possible examples of indicative or ‘soft’ guidelines we might prefer new research themes to satisfy include:
·
As far as possible all incoming research themes should address issues
which will be seen as extremely important in the community in 5-6-7 years (just
when research on the theme is really hitting its straps and beginning to generate authoritative results
and insights).
It
is the last of this sample of indicative guidelines that I want to discuss
further. I will call it ‘picking future
winners’ for short.
‘Picking
future winners’ is a fairly bold guideline because it implies making and
backing a judgement about what issues are going to be seen as important (‘hot’)
some years from now. A conservative
alternative to this guideline, let’s call it ‘playing safe’, would be to favour
researching issues which are seen as extremely important today (cf 5-7 years
time). And of course research funding
is much more likely to be available for important contemporary issues than for
potential issues. The reward for
successfully ‘picking winners’ is being able to offer more timely and
influential policy and management advice as distinct from doing ‘catchup’
research.
Notwithstanding
doubts about a ‘picking winners’ policy, it brings me to a point where I can
articulate, in context, the question I have been asked to address: If the
Division were in the busines of picking winners, would the scenarios developed
in Future Makers, Future Takers be of any help?
Let
me explain. My 1999 book of that name outlined
three scenarios about how Australian society might develop over the next 50
years, depending on which of three development strategies we adopted and
persisted with:
An
economic growth strategy based on allowing business to self-regulate and
maximally reducing the size and scope of government operations.
A
conservative development strategy focussed on amelioration and strong
regulation of business externalities (unintended side-effects) and on using
high levels of taxation to fund jobs and environmental protection schemes and
to narrow income disparities.
A
post-materialism strategy focussed on managing environmental quality by
limiting the overall use of energy and raw materials and boosting social
capital by encouraging participatory decision-making structures.
Figure
1. plots primary energy consumption in Australia and GDP (Gross Domestic
Product) as time series. The economic
growth strategy is focussed on mainataining a strong upward trend in the GDP
trace. The post-materialism strategy is
strongly focussed on bending the energy consumption graph downwards. The conservative development strategy is
looking to balance movement in the two graphs in some sense.
Figure 1
I
would like to be able to claim that my book was required reading for anyone
trying to predict the burning issues in landscape/ecosystem management in
Australia in 2007: to declare that on p73 it confidently predicts that in five
years there will be great debate about the environmental impact of the
Gladstone to Adelaide High Speed Ground
Transport proposal; that p89 predicts that the effect of Western Australian
land clearing on SA rainfall will be a hot topic; and on p200 that the ecology
of GMOs will be a topic at dinner
parties in Toorak and Vaucluse. If I could predict such developments with total
confidence it would make research planning much easier and I would be in line for hugs and kisses from
the Executive Committee.
Under
any of my scenarios the emergent issues would still probably fall beneath the
headings I identified earlier---location issues, ecosystem issues, service
issues and socio-economic issues. The
mix might be somewhat different under different scenarios reflecting the
pro-growth, pro-environment or pro-sustainability (ie a growth-environment balance) values of the different scenarios
but, seeing that the future is going to be some unpredictable mix of all three
scenarios I am not in a position to start predicting the actual mix.
Nor
can I predict the rate at which issues will appear. It is however worth noting
that to the extent that Australia
follows an economic growth strategy, and it is successful, the rate of
landscape/ecosystem change will be higher and issues of whatever category will
be generated at a higher rate. To this
extent, there will be more need and perhaps more demand for our research and
consulting services. Similarly, to the
extent that we follow a post-materialism strategy, the threshold of concern at
which ‘environmental’ issues are triggered is likely to be lower and issues
would erupt more readily. Under a
strong conservative development strategy, it might be the centralisation of
decision-making which sparks issues easily. Perhaps, combining these observations,
it is reasonable to assume that landscape issues are going to become more and
not less common.
I
can also ruminate on how the Division’s funding prospects might vary under the
three scenarios.
Appropriation funding: One thing
we can say immediately is that treasury
funding for an organisation like CSE
would probably be much higher under conservative development than under
economic growth or post-materialism. Under an economic growth philosphy there
would be little interest in raising taxes to fund public interest research in
areas where it is difficult for individuals to capture (avoid sharing) the
benefits of successful research. Under
a post-materialism strategy the economy’s capacity to yield taxes might be low
and, also, funding would have to be obtained from struggling regional
authorities rather than from higher tiers of government..
Even
under a conservative development scenario appropriation funding is unlikely to
be generous. There has been a loss of
faith in recent decades in the power of scientific information and knowledge to
improve the policy making process in landscape/ecosystem management. I don’t know why this is but I can suggest
two possible factors. One is that unlike
primary production research which is perceived as having been very successful,
landscape management research has not yielded quick technological fixes (Calici
virus?). Another is that change in
landscapes and natural systems has generated problems at a rate that has not
been matched by an increasing scientific effort and this inevitably leads to an
unfair perception that science has failed, and hence is not worh
supporting. To put it bluntly,
landscape and ecosystem issues are seen as being social, political and economic
but not scientific.
Funding via agencies: Ensuring
that the Division has to get a sizeable proportion of its research funding
through R&D corporations and government departments is a way of imposing
political direction on the research portfolios of CSIRO Divisions while still
pretending it is an independent statutory authority. Having to get funds by participating in this bureaucratic
steeplechase is unlikely to disappear under the conservative development
scenario but would disappear under economic growth and post-materialism to the
extent that there would be few funds to disburse. To the extent that agency funding might be available under an
economic growth strategy, it would be likely to be ‘brown’ (soil and
water-oriented) and production-oriented rather than green and sustainability
oriented.. Post-materialism funding would favour projects involving the
creation of participatory structures.
Corporate funding: It is fairly safe to assume that
there would be more funding from the private sector available at higher rates
of economic growth and hence under the conservative development and economic
growth scenarios. As another rule of
thumb, the higher the land values in an area and the greater the rate of land
use change, the more corporate funding is likely to be available (an argument
for working in the peri-urban areas?).
Corporately funded research will continue to be short-term and
self-serving and dangerous to scientific integrity. There is no escaping the adage ‘His tune I sing whose bread I
eat’
The
only other insight I have enjoyed as a result of the present exercise is that,
viewed from a very broad perspective, all components of our research portfolio
will continue to fall within the theme of exploring relationships between
economic outcomes and patterns of energy/materials use under scenarios of land
use change. Perhaps that is too broad
to be of any help. Perhaps not.
In
terms of Fig.1, and speaking normatively, we are looking for ways to have
economic growth without increasing energy/materials usage or ways to reduce
energy/materials use without slowing economic growth. Or, even more generally, and less normatively, our future
research will be about decoupling economic growth and energy/materials
use.
Cocks
KD and Walker BH, 1994, Contribution of `sustainability' criteria to social
perceptions of land use options, Land
Degradation and Rehabilitation, 5, 143-51.
Cocks
D, 2000, Scenarios for Australian Landscapes, in Hamblin A (ed), Visions of
Future Landscapes, Proceedings of Fenner Conference, May 1999, Bureau of
Resource Science, Canberra
Cocks
D, 1999, Future Makers, Future Takers: Life in Australia 2050,
University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.