Graduate's research likely to feed into regional planning
Published on 23 September, 2010
Recent PhD graduate Au Shion Yee expects many of his research outcomes to feed into government policy and planning in the Central Queensland region and across other parts of the State.
Shion is based in Brisbane, where he currently works as Principal Policy Officer with the SEQ Water Grid Manager. Whilst undertaking his research, he worked with the Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM) in the areas of water resource planning, and natural resource and catchment planning.
"A lot of my work deals with the regions and Fitzroy Basin Association (FBA) is one of the more well known of the successful groups that have developed out of regional planning and catchment planning," he said.
"There was a project put together with a mix of universities - CQUniversity, Griffith University and University of Queensland - looking at regional economic development in Central Queensland and the FBA was one of the case study areas."
"The previous Federal Government has funded a lot of the natural resource management programs out of the National Action Plan and Natural Heritage Trust and the new government is likely to continue funding in regional-based development. The findings of the research have generated significant interest within DERM to further support the regional NRM delivery model of governance.
"A lot of the findings that we have will help inform the development of those new programs, including a collaborative focus with community groups such as Rockhampton and broader Fitzroy Basin communities, so it definitely will inform a lot of future planning work in this area."
Supervised by Professor John Rolfe, Shion's 'economic analysis of Australian regional natural resource governance' identified the generation of social capital net benefits associated with reduced costs of a community-based regional delivery model for adopting improved management practices to achieve regional NRM outcomes.
