Social, economic and environmental sustainability in regional Australia
University of Sydney geographers undertake research across a wide range of issues relating to social, economic and environmental sustainability in regional Australia.
The Heartlands Project
The Heartlands project is an Australian Research Council-funded Discovery project which will examine the regional economic linkages of farm sector. Australia’s rural heartlands, defined as the inland cropping and grazing belts with annual rainfall of 600–1200mm, are in the midst of momentous social and economic transformation. Although the broad drivers of these changes are widely recognised, their precise manifestations and implications remain poorly understood. An initiative of the ARC Research Network on Spatially Integrated Social Sciences ARCRNSISS, it brings together an interdisciplinary team of eight leading Australian researchers to work on three strategically selected case study areas in the Murray-Darling Basin. It is motivated by the contention that the limitations of the prevailing, fractured, research literature are best remedied by investing a significant research effort into a coherent, empirically-grounded project aiming to establish authoritative benchmarks on how people and industries in the rural heartlands are socially and economically attached within their local and regional spaces. Through these outputs, rural researchers (human geographers, regional economists and sociologists) will, for the first time, be able to calibrate and assess various models of regional development against a credible baseline of data and insight.
The University of Sydney hub of the project is managed by Dr Phil McManus and Dr Bill Pritchard.
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Equine landscapes in the Upper Hunter
Research on the use of nature in thoroughbred breeding is supported by an ARC Discovery Grant (Chief Investigators: Dr Phil McManus and Associate Professor Glenn Albrecht from the Univeristy of Newcastle). This research develops the culture-nature approach to investigate how "nature" is understood and used in an industry that has economic importance at local, regional, state and national scales. It is an international industry that is resisting the adoption of all "non-natural" forms of reproductive technology. This partly contributes to specific economic relations that require particular networks of transportation and use of scarce resources such as water. Research covers all of Australia and compares this industry in Australia with international sites, notably Kentucky, upstate New York and Ontario (Canada). The research also investigates conflicts and alliances between thoroughbred breeding and other industries, such as coal mining and viticulture, in the Upper Hunter region of NSW.
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Farm consolidation and fragmentation
A three year project funded by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, with support from the NSW Department of Primary Industries, this project has the aim of documenting, mapping and analysing changes in the ownership and use of rural property. In 2008, the project commences with case studies of Lachlan and Mid-Western Shires.
Participants are:
Associate Professor Bill Pritchard
Dr Melissa Neave
Deanne Hickey