Some recent books and reports advocating systemic understandings and practices

Val Brown and colleagues have put together a very useful book: Tackling Wicked Problems Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination with some challenging conclusions.  It would be good if we could embed more of this thinking and practice in our Universitys and policy circles.

That said a spate of recent reports recognise the need for policies and practices that are more systemic.  These include:

• A recent report by Ruth Beilin and Nicole Reichelt (published by the Victorian Government Department of  Sustainability and Environment) called 'Community landcare: A key player in building social-ecological resilience networks?'.

• The organisation representing the Chairs of Australia's regional NRM bodies has published the report "Australia's NRM governance system: foundations and principles for meeting future challenges".

• It sets out 10 principles for future NRM governance arrangements: continuity; subsidiarity; integrated goal settings; holism; systems approach; relationship orientation; resilience; knowledge and innovation; accountability; and resposiveness and adaptability.
• From the project Improving economic accountability when using decentralised, collaborative approaches to environmental decisions. It is called 'Economic evaluation of investments in natural assets under community-based environmental governance: Developing and testing a method'.

The book 'Resilience and Transformation: Preparing Australia for Uncertain Futures'  is now available from CSIRO Publishing. The book 'explores what factors contribute to Australia's resilience, what trends are apparent, and what actions are required to better prepare us for the immediate and longer term future'.   Edited by Steven Cork, with a foreword by Brian Walker, the book contains 21 chapters by authors that include Theresia Citraningtyas,  Richard Eckersley,  Peter Newman and Susan Nicholls.  There's a chapter from Graham Marshall called 'Governance for a surprising world'.