Dale A, Turnour J, Burns S, Bock E, and McHugh J (2024). Strengthening regional planning and development assessment in the Douglas Daly Region of the Northern Territory: Solutions Report. A joint report for the Cooperative Research Centre for Northern Australia (CRCNA), Townsville and Reef and Rainforest Research Centre (RRRC), Cairns.
Overview
Our research is seeking practical solutions to resolve deep societal tensions embedded in the highly contested nature of northern development. Without a healthy system of regional planning and development assessment and approval, northern Australia faces faltering economic development in rural, remote and Aboriginal communities. At the same time, it contributes to a failure to secure internationally and nationally significant biological and cultural values within the landscape.
Through NESP Project 3.1, we have been exploring these issues in three key regions in the north. These include Western Australia’s Pilbara region, the Gilbert River District in Queensland, and the Douglas Daly region in the NT. All three regions experience conflicting issues ranging across diverse drivers for economic development, the need to conserve sensitive ecosystems, and the need to enable strong Aboriginal governance, culture and livelihood aspirations in the landscape.
In the Douglas Daly region of the Northern Territory (NT), tensions between all three of these legitimate aspirations are long standing and significant. Here, these tensions have long led to suggestions that a more regionalised, engaged and evidence-based approach might be needed to support planning, development assessment and nature positive investment decisions.
Our recent Analysis Report (Dale et al. 2024) explores and more deeply analyses weaknesses within the prevailing system of regional planning and development assessment within the Douglas Daly, as well as opportunities for improving the system within the catchment. Building on findings from this work, through this Solutions Report, we explore a series of recommended next steps focused on the design of potential, new and innovative solutions for strengthening the current governance system within the Douglas Daly.
Consequently, this Solutions Report has been developed closely with the NT Department of Industry, Tourism and Trade (DITT), other key NT agencies, the Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), the National Environmental Sciences Program (NESP) Marine and Coastal Hub and the Cooperative Research Centre for Developing Northern Australia (CRCNA).
Our key potential and suggested solutions revolve around the establishment of the necessary pre-conditions of success for new approaches to integrated regional planning and development assessment within the Douglas Daly region based on our previous governance systems analysis.
The key focus of these next steps include:
- building cross-governmental and regional consensus about appropriate models for development within the region;
- the need to ground truth the potential of these conceptual models as a foundation for evidence-based tradeoff analysis, and the integration of Commonwealth supported bio-regional planning and water allocation planning; and
- the need to build long-term local institutional capacity for the sustainable development of agriculture, tourism and land management businesses and their associated communities in the region. This could include attracting new and evolving ecosystem service markets and offset management through the landscape-scale delivery of conservation works.
This second of two reports unpacks these potential solutions in more detail, enabling DITT to work progressively with the region’s key stakeholders to progress regional planning and development assessment changes that can deliver Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) in the long-term and a bright and prosperous future for the region’s residents and supporters.
