Introduction - Environmental Management - page 4

as wilderness were formerly managed for livestock, hunting or exten-
sive agriculture. Tom van Rensburg and Greig Mill (Chapter 4) take a
functional approach to the ecology of biodiversity conservation with an
emphasis on disturbance. With rising human population leading to ever-
increasing demand for food and other natural products, policies that of er
incentives for combining biodiversity conservation with other productive
management objectives will become ever more important in the future.
The move away from protection to production has resulted in new laws
that shift the focus of management from central government control of
natural resources such as forests, towards community involvement in
management with corresponding changes in access and utilization. Bhim
Adhikari (Chapter 5) demonstrates the role that social institutions play
in the management of common pool resources (CPRs - natural resources
that are communally owned and managed). Drawing on the new insti-
tutional economics literature, Adhikari shows how an understanding of
the nature of social institutions is vital if environmental managers are to
be successful in intervening in the management of CPRs. This includes a
need to understand the property rights determining the nature of resource
ownership as well as any unwritten social 'contracts' that permit members
of the community to access and use the resource. When CPRs begin to
be degraded, it is often as a result of external pressures that erode the
social institutions that have traditionally governed resource manage-
ment regimes. Management interventions that fail to understand these
traditional institutions and the way in which they have been disrupted are
unlikely to be successful in restoring natural resource use to a sustainable
pattern.
David Ockwell and Yvonne Rydin (Chapter 6) explore the idea of
policy discourses in theoretical and methodological terms. They provide
a practical example of how environmental managers might formally
approach the analysis of the hidden assumptions, values and beliefs
that often underpin dominant framings of environmental problems (for
example, the fuel wood supply gap mentioned above) and expose them
to more critical scrutiny. These dominant framings often prevent more
sustainable, alternative policy solutions from gaining policy inl uence.
Exposing them to critical scrutiny is one way in which to demonstrate the
policy relevance of alternative knowledge. Ockwell and Rydin focus on
the now well-established i eld of 'discourse analysis'. They introduce some
of the core theoretical principles behind dif erent approaches to discourse
analysis before demonstrating the methodological and practical implica-
tions of these dif erent approaches via their application to a case study of
i re management in Cape York, northern Australia. Their chapter pro-
vides a practical example of 'how to do discourse analysis'. At the same