Spatially bounded regions for resource governance

Despite a growing body of theory that emphasises the importance of socio-spatial aspects in the representation of community interests, regionalisation for natural resource governance remains dominated by river catchments. At the same time, Australian local governments are being given increasing responsibilities for environmental and resource management, but work within boundaries that are largely historical artifacts. The confluence of these trends suggests it is timely to examine the requirements for spatial definition of resource governance regions. We contend that there are three essential requirements for efficient and effective natural resource planning and governance. First, the nature and reach of environmental externalities of resource use should determine the size and nesting of resource management regions. Second, the boundaries of resource governance regions should enclose areas of greatest interest and importance to local residents. Third, the biophysical characteristics of a resource governance region should be as homogenous as possible. We applied these principles to the derivation of an 'eco-civic', resource governance regionalisation for New South Wales. This article describes the concepts needed for this work, the results and their potential policy application. An important finding was that many regionalisations in use in New South Wales fall short on a regionalisation performance measure developed to gauge the fragmentation of representation of community interests.