A participatory assessment of NRM capacity to inform policy and practice: Cross-scale evaluation of enabling and constraining factor

The capacity of private landholders to manage natural resources is constrained and enabled by diverse, interconnected, and changing factors, which vary substantially across time and space. This context dependence of capacity makes it both a useful construct and a difficult one to evaluate, which makes targeting investment in capacity building across scales difficult. We detail results of a transferrable, place-based process for evaluating capacity of private land managers to manage natural resources across scales in New South Wales, Australia. A livelihoods approach was used to enable land managers to define, describe, and evaluate locally relevant indicators of NRM capacity. Constraints to capacity were perceived as externally imposed or related to poor vertical linkages between land managers and government agencies. Conversely, local characteristics of regional organizations, communities and individuals were often described as enabling capacity. There was substantial consistency across workshops and there were widespread indications of declining capacity to contribute to effective NRM.