First Nations peoples’ role in NRM research on private lands in the Murray Darling Basin, south-eastern Australia

Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin is beset with complex natural resource management (NRM), particularly on private lands. Addressing these complexities requires applied ecological research, local knowledge, access to research sites, and collaboration and effective relationships between researchers, organizations, and landholders. First Nations peoples and their knowledge could also contribute significantly to address these post-colonial NRM complexities. Consequently, we examined past collaborations between First Nations knowledge holders and Western researchers engaged in Australian NRM research on public and private lands. Three of this paper’s authors were invited by a group of farmers, landholders, and community members to provide advice on how to address local NRM issues on private lands within the broader context of declining engagement between government agencies and research institutions with rural communities and landholders in the New South Wales Mid-Murray region of the Murray-Darling Basin. We collaborated with the group to identify and explore experiences with NRM policy, management, and related research through stories and lived experiences in NRM. We also identified barriers to improving biodiversity conservation and NRM research in the region, including the absence of the use of local First Nations knowledge to address NRM problems. We explored a community of practice as a means to improve relationships and collaboration between local communities that include farmers and First Nations peoples, government agencies, and research institutions in undertaking NRM research on private land. This highlighted the need for broader engagement with First Nations peoples and local rural community in participation and leadership roles in NRM research. We also explored how First Nations peoples could best participate in culturally safe and respectful ways that acknowledged their interests in co-designing and participating in relevant and effective NRM research. In response we propose a Hybrid Research Model that incorporates First Nations and Western perspectives.