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Australia's metropolitan cities have undergone significant social, economic and demographic change over the past several decades. In terms of socio-economic advantage and disadvantage these changes, which are often associated with globalisation, wider economic and technological restructuring, the changing demographics of the population and shifts in public policy are not evenly dispersed across cities, but represent a range of often contrasting outcomes. The current paper develops a typology of socio-economic advantage and disadvantage for locations across Australian metropolitan cities. More specifically, the paper takes a range of Australian Bureau of Statistics data and uses a model-based approach with clustering of data represented by a parameterised Gaussian mixture model and discriminant analysis utilised to consider the differences between the clusters. These clusters form the basis of a typology representing the range of socio-economic and demographic outcomes at the local community level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current approaches to rural community development in Australia provide for limited government intervention. Such intervention is usually housed within programmes that seek to build the internal capacity of communities to achieve long term socio-economic sustainability. A fundamental implementation strategy for capacity building has been developing local leadership. The underlying assumption of this approach is that good leadership will result in existing resources being mobilised for a more sustainable function and new resources attracted. What though is good leadership in terms of building the capacity of rural communities to develop sustainable socio-economic futures? This paper compares the conceptualisation of leadership within rural development policies and leadership training programmes with the nature of local leadership as it exists in on-ground community building projects. From an in-depth review of the role and nature of local leadership within six Australian rural communities it was found that local leadership could result in improved adaptive capacity if the leadership is similar in nature to Burn's (1978 ) transformational model of leadership. Within policy, local leadership was most often conceptualised as being similar to this transformational model. However, rural leadership training programmes tended to conceptualise leadership as a top-down process, similar to Burn's (1978 ) transactional model. While this study of leadership within rural communities revealed that transactional skills, as taught in leadership training programmes, were important for successful project management, such skills did not necessarily result in improved community adaptive capacity. It is suggested that, while transactional leadership can have an important role in influencing the development of rural communities, greater attention needs to be given to developing strategies to support transformational leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current decision-making in natural resource use and management aims at delivering ecologically-sustainable development to achieve conservation and economic benefits. The process of guiding natural resource use requires the integration of social, economic and biophysical information on which to base management decisions. This paper discusses the integration of socio-economic information for natural resource management (NRM) planning and decision-making in the Australian context. A comprehensive resource of socio-economic data is the Census, which is undertaken every five years by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) for the whole of Australia. Unfortunately there are qualitative and quantitative issues stemming from the use of ABS census data maps for NRM decision-making, as they are at a different scale to and the boundaries do not coincide with biophysical information. These issues include the variable shape of collection districts, the use of enumerated data for population-based statistics, the large size of collection districts in low populated areas, and the averaging of socio-economic information over the collection districts. Examples highlight these issues and show a way forwards in improving data integration, which includes simple spatial overlay methods and regression modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently the objectives of tropical river management were narrowly construed: the development imperative drove resource policy. During recent decades, community attitudes to river and water management have changed considerably and the national program of water reform, the National Water Initiative, is accelerating alterations to the way that water is used, managed and priced. A broader range of values and imperatives is now influencing water resource management policy. Not least is the concern over the ecological impacts and economic inefficiencies of the large-scale hydrological schemes that once excited the public's imagination. This paper reports on a recent study of social and economic values of tropical rivers conducted by the authors for an Australian statutory research and development corporation. The study shows that the values associated with tropical rivers have changed and diversified over time with growing societal awareness of the contribution made by unregulated, healthy river systems to human wellbeing and cultural identity. As a consequence of substantial social change, tropical river management must now contend with a more complex array of societal values and water management objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]