Functionally, regional towns cannot be the city states of history. By necessity, whilst regional towns exist as a centre for the catchment area that sustains it, they are nonetheless subject to and rely upon the patronage of the ‘centre’ that the town ‘relates’ to. In return for this patronage regional towns are bound by the...

Resilience is about addressing vulnerability, not only by surviving a shock to the system, but also thriving in an economic environment of change and uncertainty. A robust conceptual framework is required to navigate through underlining elements of vulnerability. An evolutionary model of regional adaptive cycles around four sequential phases in economic activity – reorganisation, exploitation...

During the 1990s, the devastating outcomes of the economic restructuring on several regions and key sectors such as the agriculture and livestock prompted countries such as Colombia to undertake an aggressive program of value chain-based development policies and partnerships including its decentralization to the regions. The agreement on competitiveness of several value chains at the...

With a dominant focus of economic rationality in development and management operations, interpretations of sustainable development have limited capacity to account for the contribution of social sustainability. This paper examines commitment to and accountability for social sustainability in Australian local government from the perspective of functional council managers. A mixed methods approach was adopted and...

This paper reports on research which follows the difficult process of farm families preparing for and subsequently leaving farming. The period of exit covers the millennium drought of 2000-2010 in four case study areas in Victoria, Australia. It is concerned with families still of working age, in order to trace their subsequent employment outcomes. Identifying...