The ‘Rural Communities Wellbeing’ research project, led by Dr Anthony Hogan, Director of the National Institute for Rural and Regional Australia at the Australian National University, has analysed the drivers of socio-economic viability in country regions.

The aim is to give community leaders and local agencies the tools they need to determine whether their town or village has a realistic prospect of long term social and economic success.

Armed with objective data about socioeconomic viability, better decisions can then be made about seeking funding for projects to reinvigorate rural communities. This information may also prove useful in properly assessing whether funding proposals and investments in infrastructure will have the desired positive impact on regional community wellbeing, or whether public money would be better spent elsewhere.

“We really need to see money being invested in regions that stays in regions and that produces regional wellbeing for regional people,” says Dr Hogan.

Country communities are faced with the need to constantly adapt in the face of social, technological and economic change and some will be better placed than others to cope. The engagement of local people is an important driver in adaptive capacity, but communities also need a viable economic base to remain resilient.

However there is currently no objective means of assessing a community’s potential for long-term survival.

“What is noticeably absent,” says Dr Hogan, “is the opportunity for communities to readily assess where they stand in relation to these attributes and how any specific proposed development or devolution of their economic or environmental base, may impact on their community.”

To address this gap Dr Hogan has created a new decision support tool, or ‘choice model’, to assess the impacts of socio-economic change, which has been enthusiastically welcomed by communities involved in Dr Hogan’s research.

Chair of the Walcha Together Committee Katrina Bloomfield is optimistic about the benefits of the ‘choice model’ software, “I thought the research tool was extremely comprehensive considering the number of variables and different scenarios it covers, and it’s a tool that looked to be very user friendly that can be used by community organisations and governments to better understand the needs of rural and regional Australia.”

The Committee’s Casper Ozinga agreed, “when local councils make planning decisions, the more information they have about why things are happening, the better they can respond. When looking at issues such as why people might leave town, we tend to make subjective judgements, but we really need methods of analysing the situation objectively. This new decision making tool could be extremely useful in providing us with that objective information.”

The software-based tool is part of a series of methodologies developed through the ‘Rural Communities Wellbeing’ project to assess community wellbeing.

including:

· Social research methods for assessing adaptive capacity and wellbeing of communities in the face of external stressors.

· Modelling tools to determine a community’s economic base

· Projective demographic modelling to estimate population trends

· Decision support tool software

· Community engagement in decision making strategies

Consultation with stakeholders indicates this series of methodologies will be particularly useful for local councils and other planning agencies working with rural communities.

The Namoi Catchment Management Authority (CMA) has advised the survey and decision support tool will enable a better understanding of the resilience of socio ecological systems currently operating in the Namoi region, allowing an objective assessment of the interaction between human communities and the health of the environment and the well being of people who live in that environment.

The Rural Communities Wellbeing project represents a major step forward in the assessment of socio-ecological systems, producing new insights in this area of research, as well as creating useful methodologies to consider the future viability of country towns and communities.