Building and managing resilience in community-based NRM groups: An Australian case study

The purpose of most community-based natural resource management (NRM) groups in Australia is to improve and restore local environments, yet increasingly they face a range of challenges that impact on their capacity to do this effectively. How groups meet these challenges is thus of critical importance. This article explores these issues using a conceptual framework derived from recent theoretical work relating to resilience to change in socioecological systems (Walker et al. 2006). Using three properties said to determine system dynamics - resilience, adaptability, and transformability - this study explores the attributes of individuals and groups that help community-based NRM groups adapt and respond proactively to change. Data utilized are from a large qualitative study of volunteers in community-based NRM groups in Queensland, Australia. Using these data, we begin to develop factors that act to enhance or erode a group's adaptive capacity, and highlight issues of importance to group resilience in the contemporary context.