The Process

A partnership of Regional Development Australia Murraylands and Riverland (RDAMR), Murraylands and Riverland Landscape Board (MRLB) and Murraylands and Riverland Local Government Association (MRLGA) led the development of the Murraylands and Riverland Plan through a process of collaboration with the community and local stakeholders.

The MR Plan Steering Committee was assembled to advise and support the MR Plan project team.

This Steering Committee was comprised of Chief Executive Officers (or equivalent) from RDAMR, MRLGA, MRLB, one Riverland and one Murraylands Council, one Riverland and one Murraylands Aboriginal representative, one MR community representative, and one MR industry representative, plus the PIRSA Regional Coordinator and an independent Chair.

Following a Terms of Reference, the Steering Committee met monthly from August 2021 – June 2022 across the region (where possible in light of Covid-19 impacts) and online to advise the project lead, RDAMR, on consultation, engagement and process to develop the MR Plan.

Independent consultant, democracyCo were appointed by the Steering Committee (following a tender submission process) to undertake detailed project engagement activities aligning with the MR Plan project purpose.

The democracyCo team assisted with the facilitation of the Community Conversations, Regional Summit and Interest Panel forums.

Their expertise ensured that the MR Plan process truly captured the voice of the community.

With the assistance of community engagement experts, democracyCo, a diverse range of 28 community members from across the region were interviewed in October 2021.

Steering Committee members and project partner organisations, along with some democracyCo staff, identified people in their personal networks (not professional networks) with an emphasis on identifying everyday people in the community who would be less likely to participate in a traditional planning or consultation engagement process.

We listened, not telling them of existing or developing plans; just listened, questioned and learned.

The interviews were intended to help to prepare and frame the resilience challenge authentically before we embarked on broadscale engagement on this issue.

The interviewees are at the core of the Community Conversation Guide and Host Guide.

This stage aimed to understand how the community and stakeholders viewed the strengths and the weaknesses of the region’s communities – collecting valuable data and insights that provided a sense of opportunities and challenges that required attention.

Community Conversations commenced with Soft Launch events held in November 2021 across the region in Berri, Murray Bridge and Lameroo.

The conversations were guided by The Community Conversation Guide, a document framed by the feedback received from interviewees both in terms of the language used and the content detailed.

The Guide was designed to enable small community groups to come together and discuss their strengths and what they needed to support their resilience.

Any community member could host a Community Conversation and they were supported in doing this by the Host Guide.

Four Interest Panels were convened to deeply explore four prioritised areas as developed by a Regional Leadership Panel of volunteer MR Plan participants, through reflection of democracyCo’s analysis of Interview, Community Conversation and Regional Summit feedback.

The four Interest Panel focus areas were:

• Productive and Collaborative Futures
• Leadership in Action
• Together Community
• Prepared and Proactive

An open invitation to register to participate in the Interest Panels was extended to the public, and all participants involved in the process to this point were invited to register their interest to participate.

In addition, the RDAMR Project Team, Project Partners, Steering Committee and democracyCo met to identify key stakeholders that needed to be involved in each of the Interest Panels.

This process resulted in 56 people participating in four Interest Panels, each meeting three times as individual groups and coming together once to review the completed draft Plan.

The Murraylands and Riverland Plan is one of the first Regional Drought Resilience Plans for South Australia, presenting our region with great opportunities to be first-in-line to access further support under the Future Drought Fund and other Australia Government programs.

We understand the system now better than when we started but the hero of this process remains agriculture, and the villain, drought.

The impacts of drought on agriculture may well have been the ‘problem’ on which this process focused at the start, but we can now see that building resilience in and around our agricultural sector is at the heart of the ‘solution’ for our entire regional ecosystem.

The process of developing the Murraylands and Riverland Plan (MR Plan) commenced through the Regional Drought Resilience Planning process, starting with a focus on building the resilience of the agriculture sector to the impacts of drought.

As community interviews and discussions grew, the scope grew, encompassing all elements of the regional ecosystem as we currently understand it – including the supporting and service industries to agriculture and its many communities, and considering the impacts of climate change from floods and storms to droughts, pandemic and other biosecurity risks, and changes in global financial and trade settings.

We now see that the system is connected. It is complex.

We understand the system now better than when we started but the hero of this process remains agriculture, and the villain, drought. The impacts of drought on agriculture may well have been the ‘problem’ on which this process focused at the start, but we can now see that building resilience in and around our agricultural sector is at the heart of the ‘solution’ for our entire regional ecosystem.

You can view the MR Plan below: