Scholarships boost resource studies
	Liquid assets: LWRRDC Executive director, Phil Price (left), with scholarship winners Simon Niemeyer and John Dore
Two ANU postgraduate students, John Dore and Simon Niemeyer, have each been awarded three-year $75,000 scholarships from the Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation (LWRRDC) . Mr Dore, based in the Geography Department, will be using his scholarship to examine and compare natural resource management practices in Australia, New Zealand and North America. "By putting overseas practices under the microscope, as well as our own, I hope to identify for Australia opportunities which will boost its capacity to sustainably manage its natural resources - particularly in river-basin management," Mr Dore said. "Institutions managing natural resources, both here and overseas, face a number of challenges, particularly the task of combining socio-cultural, socio-political and socio-economic factors with biophysical and ecological knowledge. "However, innovative management practices such as 'integrated resource management' and 'adaptive environment assessment and management', could make this task a little bit easier," he said. Mr Dore will use his scholarship to investigate the use of these techniques in Australia, New Zealand and North America. By examining the issues affecting their use in each nation, particularly with river basin management, a greater understanding of these techniques is envisaged, as well as implications for policy and institutions in Australia. Mr Dore's work will be supervised by Dr Robert Wasson, Head of the Department of Geography. He will be co-supervised by Dr Richard Baker, also from the Department of Geography, and Drs Steven Dovers and Helen Ross from the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES). Mr Niemeyer, based at CRES, will examine the role of the "citizen" in how society makes decisions on using its environmental resources. His scholarship will assist research into the factors that come into play when communities, industries and government make decisions on environmental issues. They will be compared to alternative decision making methods, including a novel approach called "citizens' jury" which has been trialed in Britain. "A citizens' jury involves taking a group of people who have no particular stake in an environmental issue and asking their views on the topic - for example, should we log or preserve a forest," Mr Niemeyer said. "After hearing their initial views on the topic, the group is informed about the issue in greater detail so they can re-consider all the relevant factors and deliberate over them. The next step is to measure their opinions about the issue again to determine if their views have changed," he said. "The recommendations of the citizens' jury are then fed into the political process." Simon plans to use his scholarship to assess the effectiveness of citizens' juries as a method for social decision making from an ecological economic perspective. "This approach looks at a broad range of factors when making a decision, meaning that the outcome should not only be good for humans, but also for the environment," he said. LWRRDC Executive Director, Dr Phil Price, said the Corporation's support of Mr Dore's and Mr Niemeyer's research demonstrated its commitment to expanding Australia's knowledge on natural resource issues.