Community Co-designed Policy and preparedness for Nature-POsitive Investment

Earlier this month, our Managing Director Ro attended the Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform Sustainability Science Symposium hosted by the CSIRO in Canberra. There we learnt about a CSIRO project analysing local government strategic documents as an indicator of community preparedness for nature-positive investments. This demonstrates the importance of local strategic policy documents for driving regional investment and has got us thinking about the community co-designed Natural Resource Management Strategy for the Huon Valley.​

Over the past 6 months, Mountain Ash Insights has been delighted to work with the Huon Valley Council on their Natural Resource Management Strategy titled - Land, Air and Water (LAW) Strategy. This Strategy is being co-designed with the community – a novel and leading approach for public policy development, but not without its challenges. 

Traditional strategy development usually involves drafting a new policy document, prior to public consultation. Sometimes there is stakeholder engagement at the start of the process, but not always. The co-design approach taken by Huon Valley Council saw the community heavily involved in every stage of the process with a regular Working Group established to progress the project. 

Mountain Ash Insights was brought into this project when the co-design process had been ongoing for some time. There had been really strong community input, with lots of passion and ideas for Natural Resource Management in the Huon Valley. What is often the challenge is taking all the wide-ranging views and suggestions and distilling these into strong strategic priorities. This was the task given to Mountain Ash Insights. 

Through this project we worked with the Huon Valley Council policy officer to further refine the scope, purpose and strategic framework for the Strategy. We worked with the Working Group to develop methods for analysing the community input data. Through this process, we distilled strategic priorities, underlying values and potential actions for key strategic partners. We even had time to draft the document layout and some of the Strategy's content. 

Reflecting on the work going on at our national science agency - the CSIRO, what could demonstrate on-the-ground community preparedness for nature positive investment better than a co-designed Natural Resource Management Strategy.

​We’ve loved having the opportunity to help the Huon Valley Council progress the LAW Strategy. It's not quite finished but we hope that with this Strategy it's pocket, the Huon Valley will be well positioned into the future.