Researchers

DR ROD GRIFFITHDr Rod Griffith

ILWS adjunct research fellow Dr Rod Griffith, who began his working life as an ecologist but has had a very varied career, has decided to “get back to his roots.”

“I decided earlier on in life that if I was interested in sustainability it wasn’t really useful working entirely on plants and animals and I had to start working with changing people and activities,” says Rod, 57, whose career includes three years with the Murray Darling Basin Commission (2002-2005) as manager of its Integrated Catchment Management section. One thing led to another but always pursuing the idea of the relationship between humans and their environment, a human or social ecology if you like. More recently I felt I was getting pigeon-holed as a social researcher and wanted to go back to my roots to a large extent but not to forget we are working in interdependent systems which are why I’ve started to pick up new research on social ecological systems.”

These days Rod, as well as being an Institute adjunct, runs his own consultancy company, Rod Griffith & Associates, from his home in Canberra and is a visiting fellow with the Centre for Integrated Catchment and Management (iCAM) with ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society. “I’m still interested in the big change agendas but these days I’m more interested in attention between transformation and transaction,” says Rod. “And as climate change becomes more widely accepted, more and more I’m interested in the idea of transformation and what that means. I haven’t given up my interest in governance but it has moved very much towards adaptive governance, governance that contains strong feedback loops to decision makers.” To this end Rod is currently pursuing a large multi-disciplinary project on transformation in social ecological systems and one on developing an integrated framework for state of the environment reporting.

Rod, who grew up on a farm near Orange, did his Bachelor of Science (geography, zoology and botany) and his Honors (looking at the biology of the Greater Glider) at the University of New England through a NSW National Parks & Wildlife traineeship. After completing his degree he was posted to Fitzroy Falls on the NSW South Coast and covered a huge area from Wollongong to Bega along the coast and inland to Nimmitabel, Yass and Mossvale. Rod, who worked for Parks until1984, was engaged in a variety of ranger type duties but mostly he was the regional naturalist, advising park management on nature conservation, biology and ecology. Some of the projects he worked on were vegetation mapping, fire mapping (modelling, planning and suppression), park management planning, and new reservation proposals. He then worked in the building industry for three years before 10 years with the Shoalhaven City Council as its senior rural and environmental planner.

His work included developing rural and urban planning schemes, preferred futures planning, and environmental policies and strategies. After 25 years at Milton near Mollymook (where he raised a family, ran a 60ha beef stud and rebuilt an historic home) Rod left the NSW South Coast to live in Canberra and take up the offer to do a PhD at the University of Western Sydney with Prof Valerie Brown, on a scholarship from the CRC for Waste Management and Pollution Control.

His thesis, published in 2002, was titled ‘How shall we live? The sustainability agenda and institutional change in local governance in Australia’. For his PhD, Rod worked with nine local governments around Australia looking at how they translated, at a local scale, the big social change agenda – sustainability and sustainable development.  During that period he also was an associate of the University of Western Sydney’s Integrated Monitoring Centre and did some of the local agenda 21 training (which came about as a result of the Rio De Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992) around Australia.  In 2005 Rod became an adjunct research fellow with the Institute as he had got to know the Institute’s former director Prof Allan Curtis through his role with the MDBC and Allan’s then position with the Bureau of Rural Sciences in Canberra. A major ILWS research project for Land & Water Australia that Rod managed with Allan and also included Prof Kevin Parton, John Dean (John Dean Consulting) and Gavan Hanlon (CEO North Central CMA) was ‘Exploring Key Attributes and Standards of a Model for Quality Assured Regional Natural Resource Management.’ The business process improvement project ran from mid 2006 to early 2007. “It was an interesting project that has led to subsequent work,” says Rod whose recent (and current) projects include: • Governance policy for the Natural Resources Commission of NSW
• Pathways to Good Governance for Regional NRM, with the University of Tasmania (with Michael Lockwood, Julie Davidson, Elaine Stratford and Allan Curtis) for Land & Water Australia
• looking at governance arrangements for the Natural Heritage Trust (on hold pending the current Government’s review of its environmental funding)
• being on a multi-list for the Commonwealth Government for the provision of training for Program Logic in natural resource management.

Another large project that Rod has just begun to develop is an integrated framework for state of the environment reporting in NSW with the Department of Environment and Climate Change, the Department of Local Government and the Local Government Shires Association.

Rod has also just taken on a visiting fellowship with ANU’s iCAM. CSU and iCAM are partners in a major Landscape Logic project of which Prof Allan Curtis is heading the social research and iCAM doing the modelling. As Rod, who is not involved in the project at this stage, says:“I may be able to bridge between the social work
and the modelling.” Rod says he is intending to increase “my academic credibility I suppose” by developing a project on transformation in social ecological systems in conjunction with researchers from the Fenner School of Environment and Society, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, and some local Government and regional catchment authorities. “It is a major interdisciplinary project that involves social learning, resilience and adaptive governance,” he says.

At the moment Rod, who spent three months last year on a 4WD trip through the Simpson and Tanami deserts and the Kimberleys, is very busy. “Sometimes though I’m twiddling my thumbs, so when that happens I think things up and go looking for work,” he says. “One of the reasons I have developed relationships with universities is I want to keep stimulated, I want to have contacts that I can develop, and I want to travel and work with interesting people around Australia particularly in regional and rural Australia.”

Article appeared in Connections #13, May 2008