Assessing the Role of Land Use Planning in Natural Resource Management

SUMMARY This paper provides an overview of the issues facing natural resource management, and an assessment of the capacity and capability of the land use planning system to respond to natural resource management issues. The international push for the introduction of sustainable development has had an impact on land use planning and natural resource management. There have been calls for widespread changes to land use, and the introduction of sustainable land management practices, to help arrest natural resource degradation and loss of biodiversity. At present there has not been widespread changes to land use due to limitations in the institutional, statutory, and policy frameworks and the political, cultural and community attitudes to large-scale land use change at the direction of government. Limited regulatory power means that changes to land use are made on a voluntary or commercial decision-making basis, and rely on landholders having a stewardship ethic or vested interests in pursuing such changes. Statutory land use planning provides a means of legal control over changes in land use and provides and opportunity to allocate land use to areas best suited to that activity. However, because land use planning is not retrospective and essentially only deals with proposals to change land use, it relies on owners or land managers to initiate such changes. The practice of land use planning involves achieving a balance between the community's environmental, social and economic needs and demands; between the rights of private property owners, the role and willingness of government at various levels to set policy and direction, and the right of the community to have input into the policy formed and decisions made. The statutory land use planning process also provides for extensive community consultation and affords the opportunity for the community to be involved in developing responses to natural resource degradation. This provides a basis for responding to degradation and loss of biodiversity, however the extent to which this can effect widespread change in land use is uncertain and is investigated in this paper. The capacity of local government to provide strong responses to natural resource issues is also considered, and recommendations made on improvements to land use planning. This assessment uses the Australian state of Victoria as an example to illustrate the points made.