Aquaculture-Community Futures: North West Tasmania
FRDC Community Engagement Strategy Evaluation Framework
The objective for this project is to design and pilot an M&E framework and toolkit for fisheries and aquaculture community engagement. The M&E Framework support a more systematic approach to industry evaluation and generate useful information to support industry decision-making by clearly articulating priority outcomes. While the evaluation toolkit will provide industry organisations with practical resources for planning, conducting and learning from the evaluation of community engagement processes
Final report
Our Pledge: Australian seafood industry response to community values and expectations
Despite considerable investment in RD&E to understand why the Australian seafood industry has been experiencing diminished levels of socio-political and community acceptability, there is still uncertainty regarding the significant values of different segments of the Australian community for coastal and marine systems, their management and industry (Essence Communications 2015). Further, there is evidence these values and associated expectations are highly changeable and can have significant individual, business and national repercussions. While the seafood industry already operates from a strong values-based position of its own - ‘sustainability’, there is evidence the community's concerns have expanded to include animal welfare, supply chain integrity, modern slavery for example.
Understanding community values and expectations is important but not enough. Industry must articulate and demonstrate its commitments to addressing kncommunity expectations. This is critical to breaking the reactive negative cycle that threatens resource access, mental health and viability of our industry. A means of monitoring and tracking industry's success in responding to the community's changing expectations and values must also be developed.
Seafood Industry Australia's (SIA) members have identified social licence. This project is a tangible commitment to a national conversation and action to address community values. It is an opportunity to build seafood industry unity on the basis of a set of shared values and supporting practices.
Australian Council of Prawn Fisheries (ACPF) has initiated a lot of this listening and values-related work relevant to wild catch prawns. ACPF is ready to design, implement and evaluate activities that embed these values as messages and convey the supporting or changing behaviours as proof. ACPF needs to ensure that its outputs reflect the direction of the Australia seafood industry and sees advantages in liaising with SIA as it produces outputs at sector level. In doing so, it will provide a test case for how other seafood industry sectors can undertake to acknowledge and respond to community values and expectations, and make a national set of shared industry-community values their own.
Report
Seafood Industry Australia commissioned Futureye to review existing research into the Australian communities attitudes toward seafood, as well as other market research, that has been undertaken since 2014. The findings from this review were used to make recommendations to Seafood Industry Australia about what to address in their pledge to demonstrate the industry’s intent to earn its ‘social licence to operate.’
Project products
Communications Program – Increasing community understanding, trust and acceptance for the Western Rock Lobster industry
Methods to profile and connect the provenance of wild caught prawn fisheries and their values to the community
Bursaries to fund three South Australian Recreational Fishing community members to attend the National Recreational Fishing Conference 2019
Co-management is an arrangement whereby responsibilities and obligations for sustainable fisheries management are negotiated, shared and delegated at appropriate levels between government, recreational fishers, Aboriginal traditional fishers, the commercial fishing industry and other key stakeholders such as conservation groups (Neville 2008).
The Minister’s Recreational Fishing Advisory Council (MRFAC) was formed to improve dialogue and communication between recreational fishers and Government. The primary role of the MRFAC is to provide feedback and advice to government on recreational fishing development issues, initiatives and policies that impact the recreational fishing sector. The MRFAC strives to pursue opportunities to improve the co-management arrangements for the recreational fishery.
In 2010/11 an engagement project was undertaken by PIRSA to better understand what recreational fishing means to people and what future they want for their sector. Discussions generated consistent themes and issues of concern to recreational fishers, including sustainable fishing, ongoing access, funding and leadership, governance, education and promotion of the sector.
The outputs from this project identified opportunities for incorporating 'grass roots' input from the recreational sector into fisheries management processes in South Australia (Rowling et al. in prep) must include public consultation opportunities and participation in (1) technical working groups; (2) regional recreational committees; & (3) community forums.
This project aims to enhance these jurisdictional-based opportunities by increasing national-level capacity building opportunities for members of the South Australian community. In addition to the personal development aspect, the ability to create connections and links to the recreational community leaders from other states and territories will be invaluable to the future stewarding of the South Australian Recreational Fishing community.
Community Trust in Rural Industries - A framework for advancing social acceptance of the agriculture sector in Australia - A joint RDC initiative
AgriFutures Australia, on behalf of the RDC funding partners, is seeking to develop a sector wide understanding of community trust in rural industries. This scope includes identifying key and material issues with industry stakeholders in order to effectively baseline community sentiment quantitatively. This baseline will then provide data against which additional data collection activities in years two and three may be used to assess sector initiatives designed to improve trust, monitor changes in community trust and its drivers due to external factors, and clearly communicate sector sustainability narratives to key external and internal stakeholders. Moreover, there is significant power in approaching this as a collective of agricultural industries to develop a consolidated, consistent framework for community trust that may then be used in industry-specific ways as required.