Abstract
Landscape management negotiates across interlinked ecological and social systems. The current state of agricultural landscapes in Australia demands an explicit acknowledgement of the relationships between these complex adaptive systems. The ideals, ideology and practice frameworks that people use in making decisions about land management have a direct impact on the state of the environment which in turn sustains these human communities both symbolically and materially. Social capital operates across three formal and informal scales of community and society. Interactions between the family sphere at the micro scale, community and community organisations at the meso scale, and formal and informal institutions at the macro scale interact within social catchments engaged in landscape decision making. While many claim the decline of small towns in rural Australia, there is strong evidence reported through this study of the importance and potential of meso scale social capital to ameliorate these declines. Conservation of resources must include social capital as an explicit symbolic and material resource. This research explores the interactions of three scales of social capital and the role of each scale in landscape based decision-making. Meso scale social capital provides a means interaction across community and scale and this paper calls for meso scale social capital in rural agricultural Australia to be considered as a critical resource in need of sustenance and conservation.