Abstract
Community engagement has been cited as a critical component for the effective functioning of NRM to achieve sustainable management practices and improvements in on-ground asset condition (eg. Lee 1993; Berkes et al. 1994; Reynoso 2000; Berkes et al. 2001). In fact, a key facet of the current regional governance arrangements throughout Australia is the notion of community-based management (Lane, McDonald and Morrison 2004), where communities are included in meaningful decision-making activities, from participation on some regional body Boards, to influencing the prioritisation of investment decisions through regional body initiated community engagement. The first Benchmark Report (McDonald et al. 2005) highlighted that the practice community engagement remains a key challenge for many regional bodies in northern Australia. Another challenge exists in the monitoring and evaluation of "enabling mechanisms" - such as community engagement - for the achievement of sustained asset condition change. This challenge becomes more evident when considering that only bio-physical asset condition change has been systematically integrated within the reporting frameworks of the respective regional bodies, and that there is a current trend of reduced resourcing of capacity-building type activities in favour of increased funds for on-ground works.