Research Strengths

Economic diversity in the Asia Pacific region

• Theorizing economic flows and transactions in diverse economies
• Migration, transnational households and translocal communities
• Community economies and alternative economic development
• Corporations, regions and communities

Gender sensitive approaches

• Spatializing gender: Masculinity, femininity, androgyny and queer sexual identity in Asia
• Women's role in local economic activism
• Women and place-based politics

Human-environment interactions in the context of rapid socio-cultural and demographic change

• The agricultural systems of Melanesia - people, environment, land, crops, cash income and productivity
• Geography of poverty and food security in PNG
• The rural development of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu
• Formulation of research and development priorities for rural development in PNG and the Solomon Islands
• Remittance agricultural landscapes in the Philippines and Indonesia

Governmentality and regional development

• Historical geography of ethnicity under colonialism
• Regional development initiatives in the Philippines and Indonesia
• Corporate cultures and smallholder agricultural development
• Green governmentality and sustainable consumption in Australia
• Emerging animal rights and welfare in East Asia

Post-development agendas

• The development of long term indigenous agricultural sustainability in PNG
• Emerging land management strategies and new land tenure relations
• Rural to rural and rural to peri-urban migration in PNG
• New identities and models of community governance

Urban transformation

• Urbanism in a post-colonial context

[Top of page]

The Land Management Group
rspas.anu.edu.au/lmg
The goal of the Land Management Project is to understand the critical role of land managers in sustaining production from the land.

The Land Management Project was established as a multi-disciplinary School Project within the Department of Human Geography in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in 1988 under the leadership of Harold Brookfield.

The Group employs the broad concept of 'agricultural system' to encapsulate the complex relationships between the human managers, the land, the plants and animals they use to support themselves, and the natural and social environments in which they are embedded. Agricultural systems are identified by cropping periods, fallow periods, fallow vegetation, crops and soil fertility maintenance techniques. Farming systems are identified by taking account of cash cropping and commercial activities within agricultural systems.

This goal is being pursued through a number of research themes at a number of geographical scales and locations, mainly in Papua New Guinea:

• The application of agricultural systems data to rural development, rural poverty alleviation and specifically to the identification of disadvantaged Districts in PNG.
• The relationships between agricultural systems, environments and population density in PNG.
• The impact of increasing commercialization and intensification of land in agriculture on the maintenance of biodiversity and agrodiversity.
• The role of agriculture and other factors (food imports, domestic marketing and production of food for sale, environmental perturbations) in the establishment of food security in PNG.

The Land Management Group largely supports itself with external consultancies and grants, mainly from AusAID and ACIAR. LMG maintains close collaborative links with the PNG National Agricultural Research Institution, the Department of National Planning and Monitoring, the Department of Agriculture and Livestock, the PNG National Research Institute, and the PNG Institute of Medical Research. LMG members sit on the management committees of the School's Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program and the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Project.

[Top of page]

Community Economies Project
www.communityeconomies.org
The Community Economies project is an ongoing collaboration between academic and community researchers and activists in Australia, North America, and South East Asia. Through our activities we engage in conversations to learn from each other and share ideas about community and economic development initiatives. The project elaborates a vision of a diverse economy as a step towards enacting different economic futures.

It seeks to:

• describe the variety and resilience of non-capitalist economic activities.
• foster action research that develops and sustains alternative economic activities, such as not-for-profit initiatives, cooperative endeavours, voluntary projects, bartering systems, family based enterprises and household production.
• make visible the economic contribution of groups who are often seen as outside "the economy", such as retrenched workers, unemployed young people, sole parents, retired people, members of traditional and indigenous communities.
• support a variety of non-capitalist and capitalist economic activities that enhance community well being.

[Top of page]