Australian cities have observed a "consensus turn" expressed as broad public support of greater accessibility and public transport provision as revealed in metropolitan strategic plans. In contrast ...large-scale road projects proposed to traverse the inner-city of three major Australian cities reveals an ongoing and deep-seated attachment by some to car-based travel in Australian urban transport planning. Comparative case studies of these three road projects in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth explores the impact that an antagonistic relationship between the state and community has on the culture of transport planning. Through observational insights, policy and media analysis and interviews with community groups, we show that this antagonistic planning culture arises when there is a fracture between metropolitan strategic plan-making and project planning, and when clear channels of communication and deliberation are undermined.
Conservation encompasses numerous alternative viewpoints on what to value (features such as biodiversity, ecosystem services or socio‐economic benefits) and how to convert these values into ...conservation policies that deliver for nature and people. Reconciling these differing values and viewpoints in policy development and implementation is a perennial challenge.
Balancing differing stakeholder viewpoints within a single conservation plan risks some viewpoints overshadowing others. This can occur as some dominant viewpoints may lead to more marginal views being suppressed, and also through social biases during the planning process.
Here we develop four separate ‘caricature’ conservation viewpoints, and spatially quantify each of them in order to test different approaches to equitable reconciliation. Each viewpoint prioritises different locations, dependent on the extent to which they deliver a variety of different biodiversity, well‐being and economic goals.
We then show how these different viewpoints can be reconciled using numeric methods. We find that a pluralist approach, which accounts for the spatial similarities and differences between viewpoints, is able to deliver equitably for multiple conservation features. This pluralist approach provides a coherent spatial conservation strategy with the capacity to satisfy advocates of quite divergent approaches to conservation.
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Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Assuring the quality of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment is an increasingly significant issue in higher education. This article explores the potential benefit of 'consensus planning', an ongoing ...curriculum development, maintenance and monitoring strategy, to achieve consistency of academic standards for student learning and assessment across multiple campuses. This article specifically reports on a 'consensus planning' audit undertaken within the School of Education at a regional university in Queensland that engaged full-time academic staff across two campuses. Results suggest that the success of consensus planning is contingent on the personalities of academics; attitudes towards reaching consensus and top-down policy measures; and geographical proximity of the campuses. To ameliorate some of the barriers to consensus planning it is recommended that higher education institutions build the capacity of academics, supporting them to create curriculum where 'equivalence' is as accepted as 'sameness', and where debate and bottom-up practice and policy recommendation is valued.
Ireland, as an island, has a long (<7000 km), crenellate, and cliffed coastline. More than 50% of its population (ca. 5.4 million in 1998) live within 15 km of the coastline. But most of these people ...are concentrated in a few major urban centres. Effectively, large areas of the coast have a low-density population. These factors mean that Ireland is seen as having an overall low vulnerability to the impacts of sea-level rise. Even so, about 30% of its coastal wetlands could be lost given a 1-m sea-level-rise scenario. People's valuation and awareness of the coastal environment in Ireland has been limited for much of the 20th century by factors of history and emigration. Many coastal areas have remained relatively undeveloped since the 18th and 19th centuries. In the late 20th century, an island-wide awakening to the resource potential of coastal and marine environments began to change this former neglect. In the Republic of Ireland, the Department of the Marine and Natural Resources was set up in 1988, and a separate Marine Institute was added in 1991. These developments established the coastal zone as an important element in future national strategic planning. This article examines the physical components of coastal vulnerability throughout Ireland under sea-level rise and climate change, coupled with the influences of people at the coast. These factors are placed in the context of the development of coastal zone management in Ireland and its links to reducing vulnerability.
