Guest Editorial Rural governance in Australia: Changing forms and emerging actors

This special edition of Rural Society on rural governance in Australia is both timely and long overdue. For more than two decades now, we have witnessed an increased complexity in the way contemporary rule is exercised in Australia - and elsewhere - as a growing range of community, business and other non-government actors become increasingly involved in processes of decision-making and service delivery that were once considered the domain of the state. In this sense, governance is not a recent phenomenon, and scholars and policymakers have been deliberating on the directions of these changes for more than ten years. While initial writings on governance had a tendency to focus almost exclusively on its urban manifestations, it is now well accepted that the nature and impact of rural governance is equally profound and therefore worthy of more careful consideration1.In searching for an appropriate definition of governance, Stoker (1998, p. 38) sums it up nicely in suggesting that governance:. refers to the action, manner or system of governing in which the boundary between organisations, and public and private sectors have become permeable.Yet, underlying this neat definition is a raft of changes, which are neither straight forward nor necessarily underpinned by a coherent political rationality. It is for this reason that we consider the publication of these eight papers on rural governance especially timely, since they take stock of the present theory and practice of rural governance in Australia and attempt to capture the diversity of the ensuing institutional arrangements through which rural economic, social and environmental policy is enacted. We learn from these papers that the ostensible shift from government to governance does not, as once suggested, involve a decline in the importance of state authorities. Indeed, government remains heavily present in contemporary forms of governance, via the ongoing structures of Australia's federated system, and the continued role of state, federal and local government agencies in policy formulation and delivery. What this suggests is that the government-governance relationship needs to be theorised more carefully and the papers in this volume provide a useful starting point for this activity.We also learn from this special edition that the inclusion of 'the community' in governance arrangements is not entirely unproblematic either. While it would seem that governance has the potential to be more democratic in its processes and outcomes than conventional forms of government, this is by no means inevitable. To begin with, the level of resources and authority devolved to local citizens needs to be commensurate with the degree of responsibility placed upon them. Moreover, it has long been recognised that communities are not homogenous or harmonious entities with shared sets of interests, and this becomes readily apparent when we consider the broad range of actors who are now expected to reach consensus on matters over which they have diverging and competing interests. Several of the papers in this volume address this very issue and show how conflict, exclusion, and unequal power relations between stakeholder groups can undermine a general commitment to democracy if left unchecked.This is illustrated clearly by the opening three papers of this volume. In the first, Lionel Pero and Tim Smith reflect that in the sphere of natural resource management (NRM), traditional dialogue between state agencies and peak farming or commodity groups has now been extended to include a much broader range of nontraditional rural actors. In this context, finding consensus solutions that take into account the diverse views of these different groups becomes increasingly problematic, with Pero and Smith advocating multisector dialogue as a way of facilitating more inclusive forms of natural resource governance. Drawing on a comparative analysis of two regional NRM bodies in Queensland, the authors warn that even when there is a strong commitment to multi-sectoral dialogue, its enactment may be undermined by the broader political social and NRM contexts in which the groups operate. …