A.Prof Martin Brueckner

Management of cultural landscapes has struggled to understand and adapt to Indigenous ways of managing heritage through a reciprocal duty of care. We argue that barriers to Indigenous cultural landscapes are threefold. First, conceptual barriers exist due to the prevalence of inappropriate heritage concepts and frameworks from the Global North. Second are relational barriers in the form of asymmetrical relationships of power between non-Indigenous heritage ‘experts’ and Indigenous individuals and communities. Third, political barriers present in neo-colonial politics are at odds with the goals of Indigenous movements. After introducing Martuwarra RiverOfLife and her co-authors, we review these barriers within a cultural landscape framework. We then turn to the heritage politics of Western Australia to further analyse the barriers Indigenous cultural landscapes face in attaining full recognition of their significance as heritage, and as living ancestral beings with a ‘right to be known’. Finally, we describe and analyse the multi-modal, multi-year collaboration between Martuwarra RiverOfLife, the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council, Nyikina Indigenous custodians, and non-Indigenous researchers to establish protocols and processes that address the conceptual, relational and political barriers to the effective management of a multi-faceted Indigenous cultural landscape in Western Australia. We report on our methods and outcomes to date.

Conventional social protection programmes that fail to intentionally consider climate change effects in their design and delivery are criticised for not addressing the root causes of vulnerability to climate change, particularly for rural livelihoods. Increasingly, we see a shift to adaptive social protection programming to address climate vulnerability, which incorporates transformative objectives. However, there is a dearth of research into the transformative effects of adaptive approaches. Addressing this gap, we employ a "rights-based approach" to assess how adaptive social protection affords greater transformative resilience and wellbeing outcomes over conventional social protection programming. Taking Bangladesh as our case, empirical data show that although social protection programming incorporates some transformative elements, their impacts in terms of subjective resilience and wellbeing outcomes are limited. These limited outcomes result from prevailing clientelism, inadequate benefits paid to participants, lack of beneficiary participation in decision-making, and failure to address unequal gender norms and power relations. These failures are intentionally obscured through the performative practice of corrupted reporting. We conclude by proposing social protection features that are expected to promote more equitable, inclusive and just pathways to sustainably reduce climate induced vulnerability of subsistence farmers.

There exist overwhelming - and morally compelling - reasons for shifting to renewable energy (RE), because only that will enable us to timely mitigate dangerous global warming. In addition, several other morally weighty reasons speak in favor of the shift: considerable public health benefits, broader environmental benefits, the potential for sustainable and equitable economic development and equitable energy access, and, finally, long-term energy security. However, all the different pathways toward that goal involve tough choices.

Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on the mainstreaming and integration of climate change strategies to make social protection systems more adaptive and effective for tackling mounting climate-induced vulnerability. However, little is known about the extent to which climate change concerns are being incorporated into social protection systems and what drives such mainstreaming and integration. Employing a building blocks framework for mainstreaming and political settlement theory, we assess the progress made in such efforts in Bangladesh, and provide a political economy analysis of relevant policies, strategies, and qualitative empirical data. While the findings suggest that there is no distinct alignment between the growth of social protection and particular forms of political settlements, we demonstrate that the dominant ruling party shows strong political will for the mainstreaming of climate strategies into development policies; yet it does so by managing subsistence crises, adopting a top-down and techno-managerial approach to social protection to give short-term relief from climate vulnerabilities at the expense of making the schemes adaptive. Instead of improving performance by implementing programmes strictly and disciplining local actors, the dominant ruling party maintains a clientelist structure that placates elite interests, showcasing performance of developmental interventions through corrupt reporting practices. Consequently, we argue that the mainstreaming and integration process should adopt a rights-based transformative approach to social protection and employ a locally led process of adaptation decision-making in order to strengthen political capabilities of citizens and to create more just, equitable and sustainable outcomes for the poor.

As climate change accelerates, adaptive social protection programmes are becoming increasingly more popular than conventional social assistance programmes, since they are seen to enhance people's resilience and well-being outcomes. Despite this upsurge, little is known about the impacts of adaptive programmes on resilience and well-being outcomes as compared to conventional programmes. This paper examines the economic functions that both types of social protection programmes offer through empirical studies in two climate-vulnerable zones in Bangladesh. By operationalising a simplified analytical framework to comprehend subjective resilience, the qualitative data reveal that the adaptive programme is more effective in enhancing beneficiaries' perceived resilience to climate risks. Regrettably, neither programme is found to contribute much significantly in terms of enabling beneficiaries to achieve the desired well-being outcomes that one might expect to see. The paper offers rich insights into the design components of the programmes, affording an on-the-ground understanding of their implications for resilience and well-being.

Mining has contributed to human development and technological prowess over several millennia. Accompanying this practical contribution has been a growing set of interrelated impacts that society has slowly began to acknowledge. The accumulation of externalities—or impacts on people and planet—are referred to as mining legacies, denoting both current and long-lived outcomes, ranging from pollution to community fragmentation to intergenerational embodiment. Mining legacies have origins, causes and impacts in both the physical process of mining and the industry's complex role in society, where it has been integral to colonial expansion, imperialism and global capitalism. This synthesis of the special issue Mining Legacies: Still breaking new ground explores the concept of mining legacies as a term capable of capturing a more expansive understanding of interrelated and complex impacts on society, where heterogeneous modes of existence clash with the dominant Western mining paradigm and global, capitalist development. Articulating a mining legacy lens contributes to orthodox debates on mining policy and managing specific impacts, while also challenging understandings of the underlying values, potential benefits, and externalities of extractive-led development. This synthesis also offers deeper insights into community agency and resistance as well as wellbeing and governance, also offering up possibilities for transforming negative legacies.

From an instrumental or management perspective, impact assessment (IA) is a process of identifying impacts, finding solutions and achieving project approval. A recipient community, however, has a completely different perspective. For them the IA is about living with impacts, individually and collectively, perhaps over generations, and contested processes of self-determination, consultation and exclusion. IA practitioners live in a third space, usually bound to the proponent but also aware of responsibilities to communities and eco-systems. Seeking to better understand how IA is practiced and experienced, we explore the proposed Wafi-Golpu mine, located in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. Determinably focused on local effects we situate the proposed mine within the context of the national mining experience and discuss how IA practices see local and/or Indigenous communities. We find that the Wafi-Golpu IA is blind to local ways of being and seeing the world, with an opaque and arbitrary assessment that reflects its technical and Western basis and bias. We finish with observations about the proposed Wafi-Golpu mine and IA that is relevant to the approval process, as well as making a decolonial, Southern contribution to IA theory and practice, extractive industry regulation and mining-affected communities elsewhere.

The social licence to operate is a notoriously ambiguous concept that encompasses a patent normative heterogeneity, making the emergence of a widely accepted standard capable of settling controversies on its legitimate use seem unlikely. To cope with this issue, the article builds a model (adapted from Arnstein’s ladder of public participation) to measure “contact quality,” used here as a proxy for gauging the legitimacy of the social licence to operate. This model is tested on a case study from the minerals and energy sector (Base Titanium Mine in Kenya). Our findings show that a company can move up and down on the legitimacy scale, depending on the contact quality with company stakeholders. The interest of providing a social licence heuristic is to make sense of the theoretical controversies surrounding this concept and to offer also realistic guidance to practitioners searching to understand where a firm sits on the legitimacy scale, to enhance transparency and accountability of its social licence to operate and ultimately improve business practice.

This chapter compares contextual factors and employer related CSR and non-CSR preferences of young job seekers in three Anglo countries: Australia, Ireland, and the United States of America (US). Country specific preferences are compared to the average preferences of the global sample, which includes all countries evaluated in this book. The results indicate higher concern by the Australian and the US sample for all areas of CSR when compared to the global sample. Moreover, while Australian respondents and, to a lesser degree US respondents attach a relatively high importance to attributes related to corporate socio-ecological responsibility and ethics and governance, Irish students value general workplace and company related attributes higher when making employment decisions.

The chapter presents survey data from an Australian university cohort enrolled at Murdoch University in Perth. The data show that students prefer employers with good CSR and sustainability credentials and that general company related attributes are the least influential for their employer choice. Overall, the data point to a trend of growing CSR and sustainability sensitivity among the country’s future workforce, which at present is poorly matched by Australian companies. To contextualise the results, Australia today is a highly multicultural society without a clearly defined national culture. The country exhibits a raft of conflicting, cultural characteristics with both egalitarian and fatalistic environmental worldviews being equally dominant cultural biases. Despite a culture of self-reliance and a strong cynicism towards political authority, conformism is equally part of Australian culture as is the expectation on government to be interventionist and to be involved in the day-to-day management of social life. Despite these cultural tensions, there is a notable rise in pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes nationally, especially among young Australians, which is also reflected in the student survey data presented here.