Abstract
Natural resource managers are facing increasing challenges as environmental degradation accelerates and the need to integrate a broad spectrum of community experiences in management decisions is increasingly recognised. To help meet these novel challenges, this paper explores how professional researchers and communities can combine their skills and learn to work in partnerships to achieve shared management goals. Community-based research involves people as citizen scientists, whereby citizens actively participate in research concerning local issues. The inclusive nature of community-based research has the ability to produce auxiliary benefits uncommon in conventional research (Scolve et al. 1998). Social learning through active participation as citizen scientists can empower communities with new skills, knowledge and social networks, thus building capacity within communities to take an effective role in natural resource management. Community-based research also has the potential to enrich the range of management options available by increasing the breadth of accessible knowledge. However, despite much rhetoric about democratising science (eg Raloff 1998), little is known about the practice, value and problems of involving citizens as research partners in natural resource management research projects. This paper reports the findings from a comparative survey of the attitudes to community-based research held by citize n scientists, 'professional' scientists and natural resource managers. To determine potential opportunities and barriers for community-based research, respondents were asked their opinion on a range of attitudinal statements concerning its role, practice and outcomes, particularly with respect to conventional research. The attitudinal data were subsequently analysed according to the level of respondents' knowledge of and experience with, community-based research. The implications of these results for different scales of natural resource management issues, the range of appropriate research tasks and the support structures necessary to ensure maximum benefit from community-based research when it is undertaken are discussed.