Researchers

Professor Allan Curtis

Professor Allan Curtis

BA Dip Ed Melbourne, PhD CSturt

Professor of Integrated Environmental Management

Born and raised in East Gippsland in Victoria, Allan has been directly involved in farming, fishing and forestry and from an early age was aware of the issues facing rural communities dependent on natural resources.

After completing his undergraduate degree at Melbourne University in 1974, Allan moved to North East Victoria, teaching geography and politics to country high school students. His interest in natural resource management led to a long term involvement in Landcare and catchment management, including establishing the first Landcare schools education program in Australia and a five year appointment to the Murray Darling Basin Ministerial Council's Community Advisory Council.

Soon after CSU established at Albury, Allan joined its teaching staff in the School of Environmental and Information Sciences. In 1994, he completed his doctorate that examined Landcare as an example of local organisations contributing to rural development.

Allan has an international reputation for research examining watershed organisations, the policy and institutional arrangements supporting catchment management, understanding rural landholder adoption of conservation practices, and the evaluation of natural resource management programs.

His recent research has explored the management of river frontages; the use of adaptive management; triple bottom line reporting; irrigator perceptions of channel automation; and public perceptions of risk in quarantine and aquaculture. It has involved the preparation of social profiles mapping the social structure and process of catchment communities and included evaluations of the National Landcare Program and the North East CMA River Tender project, and assessments of the socio­economic impacts of changes in land use (forestry) and resource access (fishing, irrigation water).

Allan has extensive experience with a range of quantitative and qualitative social research methods and is regarded as a leading practitioner of mail survey techniques in Australia.

The evaluation framework he helped develop is currently being used by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry for the evaluation of the Australian Government's $120million National Landcare Program.

Allan is undertaking nationally significant research projects related to capacity building, dryland salinity, Landcare, river frontages and wetlands, farm forestry, aquaculture and provision of social data to underpin catchment management.

He is currently an external expert member of the National Landcare Program Monitoring and Evaluation Steering Committee and is contracted to provide expert advice to the Natural Resources Commission to assist it develop standards and targets for the assessment of catchment management in NSW. Allan was the inaugural Director of the Institute for Land, Water and Society and stepped down from this role in June 2007.

Publication List and Projects