Community action in natural resource governance can provide a pathway for improved decision-making, increased on-ground activity and acceptance of government and industry legitimacy in managing natural resources.

Increasing the role of community in the protection, restoration and management of natural resources is a stated priority of ecologically sustainable development (ESD) principles. Despite a proliferation of legal requirements for public participation and non-legal guidelines that promote community access to environmental decision making at both the international and national scale, implementation is often unsatisfactory and difficult to evaluate.

This research considers how high-level commitments to community engagement are implemented in natural resource governance. The empirical data is drawn from two qualitative case studies of participatory processes in one Australian jurisdiction. The empirical data reveals that different participatory processes co-exist under the same legal and policy frameworks.

This research concludes that participatory processes in Australian natural resource governance are primarily concerned with facilitating community acceptance and demonstrating compliance with legal and policy requirements. This focus on acceptance and compliance conflicts with ideals of devolved governance and community empowerment implied in high-level commitments to community engagement. There is limited understanding of the potential of participatory processes to address community dissatisfaction, strengthen legitimate governance and address inequitable power dynamics.

This research argues that participatory processes offer potential sites of negotiation for community involvement in natural resource governance. The data shows that balancing public administration requirements for accountability and responsibility with community capacity to participate is a significant barrier to realising this potential. This research demonstrates that legal requirements for participatory processes must be balanced with commitments to build community capacity. Integrity checks must be designed to ensure that participatory processes are well run, inclusive and explicitly address power imbalances.

Best practice standards and robust review mechanisms can ensure that legal requirements for participatory processes are implemented with integrity. Processes must be independent of political bias and allowed to continue without the destabilising impact of regular policy reform.

This thesis argues that legal clarity of key terms is necessary for better alignment of policy expectations with community aspirations for participatory processes. This research contributes a methodology that can improve the design, implementation and evaluation of participatory processes