ENVMGT 746 Collaborative Environmental Management - Course Outlines

Course Prescription

An exploration of participatory management and its potential for engaging communities, resource users and stakeholders in the pursuit of sustainable development. Students will examine strategies for incorporating local knowledge within conservation practices and for reconciling natural resource management with human welfare, social justice and indigenous rights.

Course Overview

The course unpacks the idea of participatory management with an analysis of three interventions:

Comanagement and community based management - Classes will consider the appropriateness of comanagement as a vehicle for addressing indigenous peoples’ grievances in relation to the conservation estate. Sessions include case studies from both successful and stalled collaborative projects in New Zealand, with particular emphasis on Maori involvement in national park planning. The focus will also include evaluation of decentralisation in natural resource management to communities. What are the risks and benefits of transferring responsibility for environmental outcomes from state managers to those who use directly natural resources?

Involving landowners and citizens in environmental management - Many habitats of significance are situated on private land, but it is often difficult to impose conservation values on private landowners. ‘Regulating’ landowners may yield short-term advantages, but in the long-term it may generate a wide range of unexpected consequences, including non-compliance or avoidance of the active management which is required to deal with pests and weeds. Are landowners necessarily ‘the enemy’ of environmental protection, or is voluntary protection of habitat remnants a realistic strategy for biodiversity maintenance? How can we encourage landowners to collaborate amongst themselves to achieve environmental objectives? In answering this question, a review of the international literature on landowner involvement in private land conservation and in Integrated Catchment Management is applied to key concerns in New Zealand.

Sustainable use and social learning - Sustainable use of natural resources introduces a range of new research and informational needs. Collaboration between agency scientists and local communities or indigenous peoples has been promoted as a basis for reconciling formal and local knowledge. Lectures explore both the potential and the dilemmas in this approach with reference to indigenous claim settlements which have reauthorised cultural harvests and heeded indigenous ecological knowledge but have seldom addressed indigenous developmental needs. The course ends with some enlightening examples of where genuine attempts to reconcile development and conservation have proved successful for both resource protection and local development.

Course Requirements

No pre-requisites or restrictions

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

Identify and evaluate policy implications of environmental variability and complexity. (Capability 1, 2, 3 and 6)
Understand the relationships between policies for the use of natural resources and public resistance to or the legitimacy of environmental management. (Capability 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6)
Critically analyse the impact of preservationism and regulatory approaches on citizen compliance with environmental policy. (Capability 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6)
Evaluate the conflicts between indigenous land rights and managing ‘public’ environmental values. (Capability 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6)
Explain the effectiveness of transferring responsibility for environmental/conservation policy to community groups. (Capability 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6)
Analyse policies for involving the public in the conservation of indigenous species/habitat. (Capability 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6)
Evaluate the contribution of sustainable use to maintenance of ecosystem services. (Capability 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6)

Assessments

Assessment Type	Percentage	Classification
Assignments	10%	Individual Coursework
Essay	40%	Individual Coursework
Final Exam	50%	Individual Examination
3 types	100%

Assessment Type	Learning Outcome Addressed
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Assignments
Essay
Final Exam

Key Topics

Comanagement and community based management

- Collaboration as the realisation of indigenous rights?

- (Adaptive) comanagement and the biopolitics of crisis

- Community-based conservation and the politics of Indigenous development rights

Involving landowners and citizens in environmental management

- Devolution to ‘community’ groups (Landcare)

- Multi-stakeholder platforms and/as Integrated Catchment Management

- Social capital and capacity building (Community-based restoration)

Sustainable use and social learning

- Sustainable use of natural resources: Indigenous harvesting regimes

- (Indigenous) knowledge integration and the politics of collaborative learning

Learning Resources

Talis reading lists and links to journal articles will be provided for each topic

Special Requirements

As with all graduate courses, many of the sessions will focus on in-class discussion. Completion on prescribed reading exercises prior to each session will enable those discussions.

Workload Expectations

This course is a standard 15 point course and students are expected to spend 10 hours per week involved in each 15 point course that they are enrolled in.

For this course, you can expect 24 hours of lectures/in-class discussions, 48 hours of reading and thinking about the content and 48 hours of work on assessment.

Digital Resources

Course materials are made available in a learning and collaboration tool called Canvas which also includes reading lists and lecture recordings (where available).

Please remember that the recording of any class on a personal device requires the permission of the instructor.

Copyright

The content and delivery of content in this course are protected by copyright. Material belonging to others may have been used in this course and copied by and solely for the educational purposes of the University under license.

You may copy the course content for the purposes of private study or research, but you may not upload onto any third party site, make a further copy or sell, alter or further reproduce or distribute any part of the course content to another person.

Academic Integrity

The University of Auckland will not tolerate cheating, or assisting others to cheat, and views cheating in coursework as a serious academic offence. The work that a student submits for grading must be the student's own work, reflecting their learning. Where work from other sources is used, it must be properly acknowledged and referenced. This requirement also applies to sources on the internet. A student's assessed work may be reviewed against online source material using computerised detection mechanisms.

Inclusive Learning

All students are asked to discuss any impairment related requirements privately, face to face and/or in written form with the course coordinator, lecturer or tutor.

Student Disability Services also provides support for students with a wide range of impairments, both visible and invisible, to succeed and excel at the University. For more information and contact details, please visit the Student Disability Services’ website at http://disability.auckland.ac.nz

Special Circumstances

If your ability to complete assessed coursework is affected by illness or other personal circumstances outside of your control, contact a member of teaching staff as soon as possible before the assessment is due.

If your personal circumstances significantly affect your performance, or preparation, for an exam or eligible written test, refer to the University’s aegrotat or compassionate consideration page: https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/students/academic-information/exams-and-final-results/during-exams/aegrotat-and-compassionate-consideration.html.

This should be done as soon as possible and no later than seven days after the affected test or exam date.

Student Feedback

During the course Class Representatives in each class can take feedback to the staff responsible for the course and staff-student consultative committees.

At the end of the course students will be invited to give feedback on the course and teaching through a tool called SET or Qualtrics. The lecturers and course co-ordinators will consider all feedback.

Your feedback helps to improve the course and its delivery for all students.

Student Charter and Responsibilities

The Student Charter assumes and acknowledges that students are active participants in the learning process and that they have responsibilities to the institution and the international community of scholars. The University expects that students will act at all times in a way that demonstrates respect for the rights of other students and staff so that the learning environment is both safe and productive. For further information visit Student Charter (https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/students/forms-policies-and-guidelines/student-policies-and-guidelines/student-charter.html).

Disclaimer

Elements of this outline may be subject to change. The latest information about the course will be available for enrolled students in Canvas.

In this course you may be asked to submit your coursework assessments digitally. The University reserves the right to conduct scheduled tests and examinations for this course online or through the use of computers or other electronic devices. Where tests or examinations are conducted online remote invigilation arrangements may be used. The final decision on the completion mode for a test or examination, and remote invigilation arrangements where applicable, will be advised to students at least 10 days prior to the scheduled date of the assessment, or in the case of an examination when the examination timetable is published.

Capability 1:	Disciplinary Knowledge and Practice
Capability 2:	Critical Thinking
Capability 3:	Solution Seeking
Capability 4:	Communication and Engagement
Capability 5:	Independence and Integrity
Capability 6:	Social and Environmental Responsibilities

ENVMGT 746 : Collaborative Environmental Management

Science

2020 Semester One (1203) (15 POINTS)