rural sustainable development is one the most important components of achievement to sustainable development in a national scale which is not doable without using an efficient management. therefore, recognizing the problems ahead of local management in the scale of various geographical regions of the country and attempting to solve them by using proper course of actions could be instrumental. i...

Ecosystem management via interacting models of political and ecological processes.— The decision to implement environmental protection options is a political one. Political realities may cause a country to not heed the most persuasive scientific analysis of an ecosystem’s future health. A predictive understanding of the political processes that result in ecosystem management decisions may help ...

In a classic article reviewing the field of planned change, Chin and Benne (1984) outlined three meta-approaches to the implementation of change in social and organizational contexts. These meta-theories of change – Rational-Empirical, Normative-Reeducative, and Power-Coercive – summarized the field of then-existing knowledge related to innovation at a systems level. Chin and Benne’s resulting ...

The Victorian State Government is reserving 15,000 hectares of land to protect native grasslands in to the west of Melbourne, Australia, to be managed by the Department of Environment and Primary Industries (DEPI). The WGR currently contains a mixture of high quality native grasslands, degraded grasslands and non-native vegetation including improved pasture and cropland. Managing these areas fo...

The BORA project has developed a model based on the use of Event Trees, Fault Trees, Influence Diagrams, Risk Influencing Factors (RIFs) and simplified modelling of dependencies between RIFs. The model has been outlined in several earlier papers. Some case studies have been performed in the project. The experience from these case studies has been used in order to develop a generalised methodolo...

This paper outlines a component of a study currently being undertaken to provide a new tool for the holistic management of dryland salinity. The Little River catchment in the upper Macquarie River basin of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, is used as a case study. The model uses a Bayesian Decision Network (BDN) approach to integrating the various system components – biophysical, social, ecolog...