Monitoring to Learn, Learning to Monitor: A Critical Analysis of Opportunities for Indigenous Community-Based Monitoring of Environmental Change in Australian Rangelands

Indigenous community-based monitoring has been a central feature in many international attempts to improve monitoring of and local adaptation to environmental change. Despite offering much promise, Indigenous community-based monitoring has been underutilised in natural resource management in Australia, particularly within the remote, semi-arid rangelands. This paper discusses contextual social and environmental factors that may help to explain this apparent deficiency, before critically analysing key stakeholder perceptions of the roles for, and challenges of monitoring in the Alinytjara Wiluara Natural Resources Management region in the north-west of South Australia. The analysis guides a discussion of responses to better integrate monitoring in general, and Indigenous community-based monitoring in particular, into regional environmental management approaches. We argue that community-based monitoring offers a range of benefits, including: better coordination between stakeholders; a heightened ability to detect and respond to climatic trends and impacts; the effective utilisation of Indigenous knowledge; employment opportunities for managing and monitoring natural resources; and improved learning and understanding of rangeland socio-ecological systems. Identified opportunities for spatial and temporal community monitoring designed for the Alinytjara Wiluara region could be of value to other remote rangeland and Indigenous institutions charged with the difficult task of monitoring, learning from, and responding to environmental change.