To be advised. A compulsory unit for BNatRes students. There are no prerequisites, however students should have a reasonable basic understanding of environmental and resource management issues gained in the first three years of study.
Policy is more than a set of rules and regulations governing resource utilisation.
An understanding of resource management policies must address such aspects as how some environmental issues take pride of place on the political agenda over others, from what processes policies evolve, and which decision-making models lead to efficient policy creation given a set of unique external factors. Natural resource management students, having gained a breadth of knowledge about the science of natural ecosystems over the preceding years, must now learn to translate their knowledge and skills into a human world with its value systems. Resource managers must learn to speak the language of the politician and the bureaucrat by knowing what is important to them. Resource problems in the real world are not solved in laboratories, but in the hurly-burly of political processes, societal structures, human relationships and economic mechanisms. This unit examines the social, legal and political constraints on natural resource policy and the implications of these for the management of the biosphere.