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  • ItemOpen Access
    Post-crisis risk management: water, community, and adaptation in a South Australian irrigation district
    (Resilience Alliance, 2024) Skinner, W.; Bardsley, D.; Drew, G.
    Farmers in the Langhorne Creek–Angas Bremer basin irrigation district of South Australia have faced a series of hydrosocial crises relating to drought and groundwater depletion and degradation. The crises have been negotiated through concerted community engagement and cooperation. Adaptation responses have included a combination of infrastructural development and changes to the licensing, regulation, and oversight of irrigation governance, easing extraction pressures on the local groundwater catchment. However, new risks have emerged in the wake of, and as a result of, these solutions. One aspect of the solution has been to connect the Angas Bremer basin district more intimately to the much larger continental riverine system, the Murray-Darling basin, which stretches across multiple regional and state jurisdictions. The very success of that scalar response to hydrological risk generates broader systemic risks: to water supply and quality from climate change and upstream extraction; to basin governance; and to community cohesion, engagement, flexibility, and resilience. In a post-crisis period, there is a need to understand the emergent risks from transformational adaptation and guard against complacency to ensure that the hydrosocial qualities of flexibility and resilience that enabled positive responses to the initial crises endure to respond to future crises in water supply and its management.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Consuming Landscapes? Farm value-adding and rural business diversification in Adelaide’s peri-urban region - past, present and future
    (Adelaide Peri-urban Project, 2024) Houston, P.; Bardsley, D.; Robinson, G.; Curtis, A.; Sarre, G.; Szabo, J.; Urquhart, J.; Adelaide Peri-urban Project
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    Rural Age Pensions and Rural-Urban Migration in China
    (Springer, 2023) Tan, Y.; Zuo, Z.; Deng, X.; Fraser, K.; Shen, J.
    Urbanisation is one of China’s most profound demographic and social processes today. Social inequality, particularly regarding access to age pensions, poses challenges that have significant ramifications for sustainable urbanisation and migrant labour supply. This chapter addresses two questions. The first looks at the discrepancy in participation in the rural age-pension program among the three main groups of the rural hukou-holding population: (1) migrant households living in a mega city (Nanjing); (2) farmer households with members who are migrant workers and are employed or run their businesses outside the boundary of the prefectural city where their county is located, and; (3) farmer households without any member being a migrant worker, or with migrant workers who are employed or run their businesses within the boundary of the prefectural city where their county is located. Next, the study investigates how participation in the rural age-pension program impacts choices of future living destinations (urban versus rural areas). The analysis takes two counties (Anyue and Muchuan) of Sichuan province (one of the largest origins of migrant workers) in west China as the case studies. It compares the results with those obtained in Nanjing city of Jiangsu province (a destination of migrants on the east coast). Econometric methods were used to analyse primary data collected through specially tailored surveys to develop a thorough understanding of these issues. The choice of mobility concerning future resettlement destinations (urban versus rural) for diverse groups of the rural hukou population is a function of complex demographic, social and economic factors of individuals and their households.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Operationalising the 20-minute neighbourhood
    (BioMed Central, 2022) Thornton, L.E.; Schroers, R.D.; Lamb, K.E.; Daniel, M.; Ball, K.; Chaix, B.; Kestens, Y.; Best, K.; Oostenbach, L.; Coffee, N.T.
    Background: Recent rapid growth in urban areas and the desire to create liveable neighbourhoods has brought about a renewed interest in planning for compact cities, with concepts like the 20-minute neighbourhood (20MN) becoming more popular. A 20MN broadly reflects a neighbourhood that allows residents to meet their daily (nonwork) needs within a short, non-motorised, trip from home. The 20MN concept underpins the key planning strategy of Australia’s second largest city, Melbourne, however the 20MN definition has not been operationalised. This study aimed to develop and operationalise a practical definition of the 20MN and apply this to two Australian state capital cities: Melbourne (Victoria) and Adelaide (South Australia). Methods: Using the metropolitan boundaries for Melbourne and Adelaide, data were sourced for several layers related to five domains: 1) healthy food; 2) recreational resources; 3) community resources; 4) public open space; and 5) public transport. The number of layers and the access measures required for each domain differed. For example, the recreational resources domain only required a sport and fitness centre (gym) within a 1.5-km network path distance, whereas the public open space domain required a public open space within a 400-m distance along a pedestrian network and 8 ha of public open space area within a 1-km radius. Locations that met the access requirements for each of the five domains were defined as 20MNs. Results: In Melbourne 5.5% and in Adelaide 7.6% of the population were considered to reside in a 20MN. Within areas classified as residential, the median number of people per square kilometre with a 20MN in Melbourne was 6429 and the median number of dwellings per square kilometre was 3211. In Adelaide’s 20MNs, both population density (3062) and dwelling density (1440) were lower than in Melbourne. Conclusions: The challenge of operationalising a practical definition of the 20MN has been addressed by this study and applied to two Australian cities. The approach can be adapted to other contexts as a first step to assessing the presence of existing 20MNs and monitoring further implementation of this concept.
  • ItemRestricted
    Racial capitalism and spheres of influence: Australian assertions of white possession in the Pacific
    (Elsevier BV, 2023) Chacko, P.
    Australian governments and security analysts have long claimed that Australia exercises a sphere of influence in the South Pacific. This paper argues that this assertion of a sphere of influence is driven by a racial capitalist dialectic of possession and dispossession. This dialectic has legitimised and facilitated the expropriation of Pacific land, labour, resources and sovereignty for the building of the Australian colonial settler state. It is premised on geographic moralities consisting of intertwined white supremacist, antiblack, anti-Indigenous and anti-Asian ideologies which confer on Australia a right and obligation to assert influence over the Pacific based on geographic contiguity and racialised discourses of Pacific incapacity. The paper makes this argument using Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s notion of white possession, Nancy Fraser’s expanded conception of capitalism and Jos´e Martí’s concept of geographic morality, tracing the evolution of Australia’s sphere of influence politics over four periods: the imperial era, the Cold War period, the post-Cold War period until the 2010s, and the present era of inter-imperial rivalry between China and the United States. This analysis brings together perspectives from critical race and indigenous studies, critical geopolitics, and radical geopolitics to connect race, capitalism and the construction of geopolitical space in Australia’s assertion of a sphere of influence in the Pacific. It advances recent conceptual discussions of spheres of influence, which are race-blind because they draw on theories that foreground white subjectivity.
  • ItemRestricted
    Overseas Remittances: Saving the 'Resilient' Owners of this Philippine Lifeline
    (Ateneo Center for Economic Research and Development (ACERD), 2020) Opiniano, J.M.; Ang, A.; Ateneo de Manila University, Department of Economics
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    The Local Economic Competitiveness of Rural Hometowns for Overseas Remittances-Induced Investments: Two Case Studies from the Philippines
    (Japan International Cooperation Agenecy - Ogata Sadako Research Institute for Peace and Development, 2020) Ang, A.; Opiniano, J.M.
    Rural communities of origin play an important role in harnessing the development potential of overseas remittances. This role is to enable and ensure an economically competitive locality for all entrepreneurs and investors (including town mates working and residing abroad). This qualitative case study research illustrates the local economic competitiveness conditions of two rural municipalities in the Philippines. Assessing local economic competitiveness will help ascertain the roles being played by local communities and their authorities. Findings here can also provide indications on how overseas town mates’ remittances have changed in response to prevailing local competitiveness conditions. Qualitative findings here were part of a mixed methods tool, called the Remittance Investment Climate Analysis in Rural Hometowns (RICART), which employed the rapid rural appraisal (RRA) method. A global framework and a nationally applied index on local economic competitiveness were used as guides to analyze RRA findings. It was found that these municipalities have prevailing bottlenecks that limit the economic competitiveness of the locality—and the situation may deter prospective migrant town mates abroad from investing and doing business in their hometowns. Not surprisingly, interventions of local governments to improve their local investment conditions matter.
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    Wellbeing Gap Analysis: Legatus Group Northern Councils Report
    (Legatus Group and University of Adelaide, 2021) Lam, C.; Nursey-Bray, M.; Legatus Group
  • ItemOpen Access
    Overcoming barriers to climate change adaptation policy implementation: insights from Ethiopia
    (Liverpool University Press, 2023) Kidane, R.; Wanner, T.; Nursey-Bray, M.
    This paper discusses Ethiopia’s planned climate adaptation interventions and the barriers that impede implementation of adaptation policies at the local level by using the case study of Raya Azebo district. Data was collected through reviews of policy documents, focus group discussions with farmers and interviews with relevant government actors. Results indicate that climate change is addressed in various policy documents but there is limited progress in implementation of these policies. The study identified various barriers to climate adaptation policy implementation which included a lack of financial resources, poor coordination among institutional actors and local actors’ low technical capacities for addressing climate change. The study contributes to the literature of climate change policy planning and implementation in low-income and lower-middle-income countries and suggests measures to overcome the existing barriers to climate change adaptation policies
  • ItemOpen Access
    Contributions of urban periodic markets to sustainable rural development in Ghana: A rural web analysis
    (Elsevier, 2023) Addai, G.; Suh, J.; Bardsley, D.
    There is a limited theoretical understanding of the importance of urban periodic markets (UPMs) for sustainable rural development in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores the value of UPMs to sustainable rural development by employing the rural web technique. The specific objectives are to (1) describe the characteristics of UPMs in Ghana, and (2) assess the effects of UPMs on the six indicators of sustainable rural development proposed by the rural web technique. Surveys and interviews were used to collect primary data in villages both in Ghana’s more developed southern region and the less developed northern region. Our study finds that UPMs generate important socioeconomic interactions and enable cooperative marketing in both regions. UPMs shorten the food supply chains and create new types of rural-urban linkages, especially through farmers’ direct participation. Farmers from across Ghana noted that UPMs create employment opportunities, and in turn, provide access to varieties of goods that are not locally produced. In northern Ghana, farmers’ participation in UPMs enable cross-border trading with international buyers from Burkina Faso and Cote D’lvoire. The findings imply that the modernisation of UPMs could provide a critical pathway to achieving sustainable development objectives within rural Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Contemporary Controls on Terrestrial Carbon Characteristics in Temperate and Sub‐Tropical Australian Wetlands
    (American Geophysical Union, 2023) Francke, A.; Tsimosh, O.; Tibby, J.; Reid, M.; Fletcher, M.; Tyler, J.J.
    A thorough understanding of controls over terrestrial sedimentary organic carbon characteristics in both the present and the past is pivotal to better understand atmospheric CO₂ pathways into depositional sinks such as peats, swamps, and lakes. We explored the relationship between wetland sediment organic matter storage, climate (precipitation, temperature) and catchment vegetation data (catchment vegetation cover in percent; leaf carbon content in g/m²) by means of multivariate statistical analyses to investigate patterns of carbon deposition in modern wetlands and to provide a more robust framework for interpreting sediment bulk organic geochemistry as a proxy for past carbon cycling. Carbon and nitrogen elemental concentration and stable isotope composition were analyzed from sub-surface sediments at 18 wetlands in eastern Australia. The statistical analyses indicate that variability in geochemical organic matter data in wetland sediments is best explained by geographic differences in catchment vegetation cover and, by inference, the balance of terrestrial versus aquatic organic matter input to the sediment. TOC/TN of aquatic matter may be additionally driven toward higher (terrestrial) values by nitrogen limitation in the catchment and the lakes. These processes explain up to ∼40% of the total variance in the sediment geochemistry (redundancy analyses). Up to ∼10% of the total variance may be attributed to post-depositional processes and organic matter remineralization. The remaining ∼50% of total variance in the data may be attributed to local conditions across the sites, geochemical processes that were not captured in this study, or to the different timescales covered by the sediments at each site.
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    Climate change loss and damage governance. Where are we now? A case study from Fiji’s sugar industry
    (Informa UK Limited, 2023) Nand, M.M.; Bardsley, D.K.; Suh, J.
    Anthropogenic climate change loss and damage (L&D) is a key area of climate policy. Much of the L&D governance has been situated within the international climate regime. A major gap in L&D governance is the lack of understanding of how institutions are dealing with L&D policy and decision-making at national and industry scales. This study examines L&D governance with an emphasis on policy gaps, capacity constraints, availability of data, and access to climate finance in Fiji’s sugar industry. Systematic policy analysis and in-depth semi-structured interviews (n = 28) are conducted to gain insights into L&D governance in Fiji’s sugar industry. To date, the Ministry of Sugar Industry has been unable to develop climate change and disaster risk reduction policies and plans. Other institutional constraints in Fiji’s sugar industry to avert, minimise, and address L&D include lack of human resources with technical skills as well as limited data and access to financial resources. This research recommends key policy interventions such as developing L&D policy and action plans, building capacity, and implementing a standardised practice of data management between stakeholders for urgent climate action. At the international level, the Warsaw International Mechanism and the Santiago Network for Loss and Damage could be strengthened to mobilise urgent support and action, including finance and technical assistance to avert, minimise, and address L&D in vulnerable countries.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Analysing agricultural policy outcomes in the uplands of Indonesia: A multi‐dimensional sustainability assessment
    (Wiley, 2023) Amaruzaman, S.; Bardsley, D.K.; Stringer, R.
    A wide range of holistic frameworks are used to assess the sustainability of agriculturalpolicies and programs, but much of the existing research tends to overlook the socio-cultural and governance dimensions of sustainability. This article aims to address thosegaps by comprehensively assessing the environmental, economic, social, and politicaldimensions of sustainability. We use a case study of irrigation policies for agriculturalexpansion that target the Pagar Alam upland region in Indonesia. The assessment revealsopportunities and threats from the policy that affect the sustainability of upland land-scapes and communities. By overly focusing on productivity goals while ignoring othersustainability criteria, the policy generates risks that threaten existing sustainable devel-opment pathways. To achieve positive policy outcomes, Indonesia needs to reconcile itsnational food production goal with local development goals. Lastly, to optimise policyoutcomes, agri-sustainability research should apply comprehensive approaches thatsimultaneously address multiple sustainability dimensions.
  • ItemOpen Access
    “Half a flood’s no good”: flooding, viticulture, and hydrosocial terroir in a South Australian wine region
    (Springer, 2022) Skinner, W.; Drew, G.; Bardsley, D.K.
    Floods generate both risks and benefits. In Langhorne Creek, South Australia, a historically-embedded system of shared floodwater management exists among farmers, who rely on semi-regular flood inundations as part of the region’s hydrosocial terroir – a dynamic conjunction of water, landscape, social relations and agricultural practice. Unruly floods coexist with a heavily regulated and precisely measured system of modern water management for viticultural irrigation across the region. Since the mid-twentieth century, groundwater extraction and new pipeline schemes have linked Langhorne Creek to the Murray Darling Basin water management system, which has displaced flooding as the primary source of irrigation water. The associated modernist shift towards the rationalization of water as a measurable resource has acted to sideline flood irrigation. Yet, floods maintain important viticultural, ecological and social roles in Langhorne Creek, adding to the flexibility and resilience of the region in response to water management challenges. The system involves technological and infrastructural components, such as flood gates and channels, but also relies upon the cooperation and coordination of community members. Local vignerons suggest that flood irrigation is environmentally as well as economically beneficial, rejuvenating riparian wetlands along watercourses. A more formal acknowledgement of the specific regional experiences of water management in a wine region like Langhorne Creek helps to fill a gap between emplaced and hydrosocial understandings of flood irrigation and broader assumptions about flooding as wasteful and inefficient.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Measuring diaspora populations and their socio-economic profiles: The example of Australia’s Chinese diaspora
    (Wiley, 2022) Tan, Y.; Liu, X.
    Data on diasporas are incomplete, inaccurate, and beset by definitional fluidity as the concept itself evolves. Despite their significant role in homeland development, members of a diaspora population are typically passed over in origin countries’ censuses, and policies and planning rely instead on statistics generated in destination countries. To analyse the data available from destination countries, this article deploys two coordinated concepts—diaspora and transnationalism. We construct a demographic and socio-economic profile of the Chinese diaspora population in Australia spanning 2000–2016. That work is based on the 2016 Australian Census and on Migrants Integrated Dataset (ACMID) and 2016 Australian Census and Temporary Entrants Integrated Dataset (ACTEID) micro-files sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The profile is disaggregated by permanent or temporary residency status, visa, and citizenship, stratified by geographic distribution, and compared with that of Australia’s overall migrant population. Nuanced understandings of the size, composition, distribution, and socio-economic integration into the destination lays a baseline necessary for policymakers and agencies in the countries of origin as they work toward more targeted diaspora engagement practices. Those understandings also inform retention strategies in Australia concerning diaspora groups that can enhance economic and social inclusion.
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    The terminal lakes of the Murray River, Australia, were predominantly fresh before large-scale upstream water abstraction: Evidence from sedimentary diatoms and hydrodynamical modelling
    (Elsevier, 2022) Tibby, J.; Haynes, D.; Gibbs, M.; Mosley, L.; Bourman, R.P.; Fluin, J.
    The Murray River is Australia's longest river, draining the continent's largest exoreic catchment. The river is Australia's most economically valuable, but is highly degraded by water extraction. The Murray River's terminal lakes, Lakes Alexandrina and Albert, formed following the mid-Holocene marine transgression. These lakes are part of one of the most ecologically important wetland ecosystems on the Australian continent and are recognised as internationally significant by the Ramsar Convention. As a result of upstream water extraction, the Lower Lakes are threatened by rising salinity. To combat this threat, water is allocated to maintain the Lower Lakes as freshwater ecosystems. This practice is part of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, one of the largest environmental water allocation plans in the world. The water allocations and the natural history of the Lower Lakes are the subject of academic and public debate, since the water would otherwise be used for consumptive purposes, particularly irrigated agriculture, upstream. Recent modelling postulated that the lakes were saline for much of the period between 8500 and 5000 years ago. However, using new sedimentary diatom and hydrodynamic modelling evidence, we demonstrate that the Lower Lakes were fresh for most of this time, particularly after 7200 years ago. Elevated Murray River discharge between 7200 and 6600 years ago prevented sea water ingress, despite sea levels +1 m higher than present. After 6600 years ago, the lakes remained predominately fresh. Current management is, therefore, consistent with the lakes' history before European colonisation.
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    International Migration as a Social Protection Mechanism in the Philippines: Issues and Implications
    (Europaischer Hochschulverlag GmbH and Co. KG, 2010) Opiniano, J.M.; Eyebiyi, E.; Sheen, V.; Herrmann, P.
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    The Philippine "Diasporic Dividend": Maximizing the Development Potentials of International Migration
    (Scalarbini Migration Center (SMC), 2008) Opiniano, J.M.; Aldaba, F.; Baggio, R.F.F.; Asis, M.M.
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    The Panorama and Drama of International Migration and Development in the Philippines
    (Palacky University, 2008) Opiniano, J.M.; Stojanov, R.; Novosák, J.; Opiniano, J.M.; Gemenne, F.; Siwek, T.
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    Waning in Power? Workers' Organizations in the Formal and Informal Labor Sectors
    (Civil Society Resource Institute (CSRI), Philippines, 2011) Opiniano, J.M.; Yu-Jose, L.