Search

Objective: Culturally safe service provision is essential to improving social and emotional wellbeing among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and to eliminating health inequities. Cultural safety is about ensuring that all people have a safe and healing journey through services, regardless of their cultural background. In this project, we aim to (1) understand how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples conceptualise cultural safety, and (2) co-design a qualitative interview for the next phase of this project, where we plan to learn about experiences of cultural safety within mental health services. Methods: We conducted six focus groups (in one metro and two regional areas, Western Australia). Following an Aboriginal Participatory Action Research methodology, we yarned with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mental health service users, carers, community members, mental health professionals and Cultural Healers about cultural safety. Results: Participants described a culturally safe service as one where Aboriginal cultural knowledges, life experiences, issues and protocols are understood and acknowledged, and reported that mainstream mental health services are not currently culturally safe. Participants emphasised the importance of building trust, rapport, reciprocity and following appropriate relational processes when designing a qualitative interview for the next phase. Conclusions: A lack of cultural safety in mental health services is likely to contribute to the disparity in outcomes between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non-Indigenous Australians. Embedding cultural safety into research design allows for authentic community engagement and facilitates knowledge sharing around ways to improve cultural safety in mental health services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective governance of social‐ecological systems (SES) is an enduring challenge, especially in coastal environments where accelerating impacts of climate change are increasing pressure on already stressed systems. While resilience is often proposed as a suitable framing to re‐orient governance and management, the literature includes many different, and sometimes conflicting, definitions and ideas that influence how the concept is applied, especially in coastal environments. This study combines discourse analysis of the coastal governance literature and key informant interviews in Tasmania, Australia, demonstrating inconsistencies and confusion in the way that resilience is framed in coastal governance research and practice. We find that resilience is most often framed as (1) a rate of recovery from disturbance or (2) the process of acting in response to, or anticipation of, a disturbance. A third framing considers resilience as an emergent property of SESs. This framing, social‐ecological resilience, accounts for multiple configurations of SES, which necessitates adaptation and transformation strategies to address changes across temporal and spatial scales. Coastal managers recognised the value of this third framing for governing coastal SESs, yet the confusion and inconsistency in the literature was also evident in how they understood and applied resilience in practice. Expanding the use of social‐ecological resilience is essential for more effective coastal governance, given the dynamics of coastal SESs and the intensity of social, economic, and environmental drivers of change these systems face. However, this requires addressing the unclear, confused, and superficial use of resilience‐oriented concepts in research and policy discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the global challenges of the Anthropocene, including biodiversity loss, there are increasing calls for positive, inspirational futures to motivate action and help steer away from current, largely unsustainable trajectories. The three horizons framework is an approach in future studies that engages with normative futures and helps develop pathways towards them. However, this approach has not been applied to explore opportunities for biodiversity conservation with farming communities. We developed a template to apply the three horizons framework in combination with storytelling to explore positive futures for agricultural landscapes with rich biodiversity. We then applied this method over two workshops with a rural community in a farming landscape of south-eastern Australia facing typical contemporary challenges of an ageing population, climate change, biodiversity loss and global market uncertainty. In the workshops, six pathways for change were developed. We unpack these narratives of change to contrast problem framings, future aspirations and mechanisms of change and discuss implications for conservation. We discuss our approach to integrating diverse perspectives and values, creating actionable knowledge and highlight the role of governance and policy to support individual and collective agency. We conclude that the three horizons approach has the potential to create actionable knowledge through locally meaningful narratives of change, and thus influence priorities and empower local action. For lasting on-ground change, leadership and effective cross-scale governance is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The disparity in mental health outcomes compared with non‐Indigenous Australians means that there is an urgent need to develop an evidence base around how services can better support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. A critical first step is to embed cultural safety into research methodologies. Objective: Here, we aim to establish the foundation of a research project through co‐designing a qualitative interview with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander consumers and community members about experiences of cultural safety with mainstream mental health services. Design: Voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples must be empowered across all stages of research. An Aboriginal‐led research team conducted focus groups to understand clear, sensitive, and culturally appropriate ways of asking about experiences in mental health care, to co‐design an interview on this topic. Participants were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander consumers of mental health services, carers, mental health workers, Elders and Cultural Healers, living in Metropolitan and Regional Western Australia. Findings: Results suggest that Indigenous governance, together with investing in ongoing, and meaningful cultural awareness and cultural safety training (cultural awareness being a first step towards safety) for non‐Indigenous researchers, together with taking the time to build respectful partnerships with communities through ongoing consultation, were appropriate and comprehensive methods of co‐designing an interview. Discussion: The process of working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in research is as important as the outcome. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership, self‐determination, and relationship building with communities are essential. Conclusion: Empowering co‐design methodologies are flexible, iterative, and ensure that the experiences and views of participants are valued, leading to more meaningful results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global biodiversity is facing an extinction crisis. Australia has one of the highest terrestrial species extinction rates in the world. Scientists, policy advisors and governments have recommended that the issue be addressed at a landscape-scale, while noting that there are significant knowledge gaps that are hampering implementation of such an approach. From 2011–2015, the Australian Government funded a transdisciplinary research program, the Landscapes and Policy Hub, to meet this need. Transdisciplinary research is widely acknowledged as essential to address the complexity of contemporary environmental problems. Given that such research programs are in their infancy, it is important to evaluate their efficacy and provide an empirical basis for improving their design. This paper presents an evaluation of the strategies fostering transdisciplinarity adopted by the Landscapes and Policy Hub. A heavy emphasis on communication, with skilled knowledge brokering, regular face-to-face meetings using participatory activities and shared field engagements enhanced transdisciplinary interaction between researchers and research users. However, establishing a fully integrated interdisciplinary research program remained a challenge. Efforts to enable shared conceptual frameworks to emerge through adaptive application of theory in practice could have been balanced with increased effort at the outset for researchers and research users to collaboratively formulate shared research questions, leading to the establishment of teams that could address these questions through cross-mobilisation of interdisciplinary expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformation is a key concept in social-ecological systems research, and transition theory in particular; however, the essential elements of a transformation are yet to be clearly articulated. This article explores the changes that took place when Australian governments deliberately set out to restructure the Australian dairy industry. Using the subtropical dairy industry as a case study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with industry stakeholders. Our analysis was structured around transition concepts thus testing the framework's efficacy. We found that deregulation substantially altered the culture of the industry and the structure and working practices of the production system, supply chain, industry organisations and government agencies. Transition theory and its concepts provided a useful framework to explain how systemic change transformed the industry. Transition theory identified the multi-scalar nature of the interactions between structure and practice and the social and power relationships that reinforced change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural industries in developed countries may need to consider transformative change if they are to respond effectively to contemporary challenges, including a changing climate. In this paper we apply a resilience lens to analyze a deliberate attempt by Australian governments to restructure the dairy industry, and then utilize this analysis to assess the usefulness of resilience thinking for contemporary agricultural transformations. Our analysis draws on findings from a case study of market deregulation in the subtropical dairy industry. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with dairy producers, their service providers, and industry and government staff. We found the adaptive cycle concept contributed to understanding how deregulation changed industry structures and working practices, how those changes led to feedbacks within the production system and supply chain, and how the industry following deregulation has experienced periods of stability and instability. Regime shifts were associated with an increase in demand for human capital, a degradation of cognitive social capital and a reduction in farm income. Findings identified that were not readily explained by the resilience thinking conceptual framework include a producer's ability to anticipate and make choices and the change in social and power relationships in the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural resource management (NRM) organizations are increasingly looking to resilience thinking to provide insights into how social and environmental systems interact and to identify points of intervention. Drawing on complex systems analysis, resilience thinking emphasizes that landscapes constantly change from social and ecological interactions, and focuses NRM planners’ attention on identifying key variables, feedbacks, and thresholds that can help improve intervention strategies. More deliberative approaches are being developed to use resilience thinking in ways that engage and build human capacity for action. This article documents experiences shared with NRM agencies in rural Australia as we developed new approaches to link resilience thinking with collective learning principles. We present an emerging framework through which heuristics associated with resilience thinking is being used as part of a planning-by-doing process. The framework is being tested to assess whether and how it can enable change agents to advance their capacities for adaptation and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discusses the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act, which was passed on May 24, 1995 by the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly Australia. What the act permits; Information on the issue surrounding whether patients should be able to request enthanasia raises; Details on the pro and anti-euthanasia situation in Australia.

Conventional approaches to environmental governance and management are limited in their responses to uncertainty and complexity of social-ecological system (SES) change. Prevailing neoliberal and efficiency-based mindsets tend to focus on avoiding risk and creating "fail-safe" systems. In the last decade, resilience thinking has emerged as a means to transition from risk-averse, and command-and-control governance approaches towards those that are more adaptive, innovative and collaborative. To examine the practical usefulness of a resilience thinking approach, we used a complex, multi-layered case study of Tasmanian coastal governance. Drawing on the diverse expertise and a variety of key governance actors, we identified crucial problems being experienced with the Tasmanian coastal governance regime and discussed potential contributions of resilience thinking to address them. Thematic analysis of the results revealed three major contributions: resilience thinking (1) provides a way to think about change and uncertainty; (2) is compatible with proactive and entrepreneurial leadership; and (3) effectively considers issues of scale in the decision-making process. We conclude by offering practical suggestions towards devolved leadership and improved cross-scale collaboration, and consider the possibility of a hybrid resilience and risk-based approach to coastal management and governance. • Prevailing neoliberal mindsets focus on creating "fail-safe" systems. • Resilience thinking suggests a transition towards more adaptive approaches. • We suggested a hybrid risk-resilience approach of for Tasmanian coastal governance. • The approach facilitates an entrepreneurial leadership and stakeholder engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The delivery of services to improve Aboriginal health and well-being must centre culture and integrate a social and emotional well-being understanding and approaches. These approaches are essential in increasing access to, and engagement with, health services, as well as ensuring culturally safe, person-centred and community-centred care. This study will evaluate the Aboriginal Health Council of Western Australia's social and emotional well-being model of service being piloted in five Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services across five of Western Australia's regions. The model of service includes the establishment of interdisciplinary social and emotional well-being teams and a four-pillar approach to service delivery., Methods and Analysis: An Aboriginal Participatory Action Research methodology will be undertaken which calls for Indigenous leadership and governance, capacity-building of community co-researchers and engagement in reflexive practice. The evaluation will take a mixed-methods approach to data collection, including at each pilot site, yarns with up to five clients engaging with social and emotional well-being services; qualitative interviews with up to five service providers at each site, and up to five key knowledge holders from stakeholders including funders and commissioning bodies; the collection of clinical data; facilitated discussion using the social and emotional well-being Systems Assessment Tool; and document analysis and cost-estimation. Analysis will be guided by a client journey mapping framework, and data will be collectively analysed through a socioecological framework to understand the connections and inter-relatedness between client outcomes and experiences, social and emotional well-being team and service provider experiences, service systems and governance structures., Ethics and Dissemination: This evaluation was approved by the Western Australian Aboriginal Health Ethics Committee (HREC1204). The findings will be disseminated through the production of an evaluation report and academic publications and presentations. Findings will also be disseminated through community forums and plain language summaries. These outputs will detail evaluation findings and recommendations, the process of evaluation through an Aboriginal Participatory Action Research approach and the collaborative stakeholder relationship-building that underpinned the project., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)