Evaluation of the Land Management Code in Walgett
The situation:
In 2016 the NSW Government introduced a new legal framework for clearing and management of native vegetation on rural land. The framework was touted by the government as a new era in rural land management that would allow farmers to improve both agricultural productivity and biodiversity outcomes.
Local Land Services (LLS), the government agency that oversees implementation of the framework, wanted to evaluate a key part of the reforms - the land management code - against the government’s priorities. Specifically, they wanted to understand:
Whether the outcomes of the code matched the government’s intent
Whether the code appropriately balanced economic, social, and environmental priorities
How the code could be applied alongside the Biodiversity Assessment Method (the BAM), part of a new suite of biodiversity conservation legislation in NSW
To do this, they conducted a trial of the code with seven landholders near Walgett in northern NSW. LLS commissioned studies into the ecological, economic, and social outcomes of the trial, and asked Open Lines to analyse and evaluate the results.
The solution:
On the surface, this project looks fairly simple. We take the output from the expert reports, put it all together, write an executive summary and go home for jam and scones. But to do this kind of evaluative work well you need to think very carefully about what questions to ask and how the answers to those questions actually capture the success (or otherwise) of the reforms. This requires two key things:
A clear understanding of the intent of the reforms
A set of questions that are both answerable (within the scope of the project) and informative
We had three main resources for trying to understand the intent of the reforms:
Speeches by the Minister for Agriculture
Policy documents associated with the reforms
Discussions with LLS
Of these, clear, constructive discussions with LLS were essential. Not only did they ensure we had correctly understood the intent of the reforms, but they also gave LLS confidence that we were evaluating the right things. Involving them in this process gave the results legitimacy and made them meaningful to our client.
Coming up with the right questions is a balancing act. On one hand, you need questions that actually relate to and capture the intent of the reforms. But you also need to ask questions that can be answered with the available data, and by the expert teams carrying out the economic, environmental, and social analysis.
To do that, we had to engage effectively and in an ongoing way with those experts. This wasn’t intended to be a big part of the project but it ended up being a major component of the work. Working closely with the experts ensured that their analysis contributed useful information to the broader evaluation, and that our evaluation framework didn’t rely on information these experts couldn’t provide.
The outcome:
We pulled together the results of our discussions with LLS and the technical experts into an evaluation report. Keeping our evaluation framework aligned with the output of the expert reports made the results of that evaluation clear and ensured that the recommendations were based on the best available evidence.
LLS were impressed with the clear, logical process we used for the evaluation, and their role in developing the evaluation gave them confidence in the results.
The project was delivered within a very tight timeframe, which allowed LLS to submit the report to their Minister as part of a review of the reforms. That allowed the NSW Government to continue an ongoing process of reviewing and improving land management laws in the state.