Introduction: Retention of GPs in the more remote parts of Australia remains an important issue in workforce planning. The Northern Territory of Australia experiences very high rates of staff turnover. This research examined how the process of forming 'place attachment' between GP and practice location might influence prospects for retention. It examines whether GPs use 'adjustment' (short term trade-offs between work and lifestyle ambitions) or 'adaptation' (attempts to change themselves and their environment to fulfil lifestyle ambitions) strategies to cope with the move to new locations. Methods: 19 semi-structured interviews were conducted mostly with GPs who had been in the Northern Territory for less than 3 years. Participants were asked about the strategies they used in an attempt to establish place attachment. Strategies could be structural (work related), personal, social or environmental. Results: There were strong structural motivators for GPs to move to the Northern Territory. These factors were seen as sufficiently attractive to permit the setting aside of other lifestyle ambitions for a short period of time. Respondents found the environmental aspects of life in remote areas to be the most satisfying outside work. Social networks were temporary and the need to re-establish previous networks was the primary driver of out migration. Conclusion: GPs primarily use adjustment strategies to temporarily secure their position within their practice community. There were few examples of adaptation strategies that would facilitate a longer term match between the GPs' overall life ambitions and the characteristics of the community. While this suggests that lengths of stay will continue to be short, better adjustment skills might increase the potential for repeat service and limit the volume of unplanned early exits.
The Canadian 'staples thesis' literature has documented both the risks (in the tradition of Harold Innis) and the opportunities (in the tradition of W. A. Macintosh) inherent in economies that are dependent on the export of minimally processed natural resources. The key risk is that of retarded long‐term growth as a result of a lack of diversification and over‐dependence on foreign capital and markets. This article argues that the demographic consequences of staples approaches to development also make it difficult to achieve diversification. It profiles Australia's Northern Territory as an example of a mining‐dependent (fiscal) economy that demonstrates a particular demographic profile consistent with what might be expected of a resource frontier. The article argues, however, that restrictive demographic characteristics persist (high sex ratios, high population mobility, disadvantaged position of indigenous people and remote dwellers) even though mining has become an insignificant direct employer (less than one percent of the workforce) and the services sector drives the labour market. This persistence can be linked to the Territory and federal government expectations of economic development patterns in the region and the frontier mythology created around the Northern Territory. Addressing the demographic imbalance is a critical step towards realizing ambitions for economic diversification.
This chapter examines the decline of tourism in Katherine, one of the Northern Territory's iconic remote destinations. While the decline coincided with severe floods damaging much of the town and its tourism infrastructure in 1998, other factors such as the overall decline of Outback tourism in Australia and changes in key markets such as backpackers and self-drive tourists contributed to the difficulty in reviving Katherine's tourism industry following the floods. Katherine tourism demonstrates characteristics consistent with the Beyond Peripherymodel of tourism development in remote or sparsely populated areas. The chapter argues that Katherine has become even more distant and disconnected from tourist markets, investors and policy makers since the floods. Key issues for future development include an increasingly uneven relationship between Katherine and the capital city of Darwin, and an inability to identify alternative markets and development paths independent of the dominant tourism structures in the Northern Territory. Katherine is an example of a remote destination which initially had substantial competitive advantages because of its location and levels of local investment in tourism, but has since lost those advantages due to a failure to respond to changing market forces. The chapter thus emphasises the fragile nature of tourism in remote locations, and its vulnerability to exogenous shocks and changing government priorities, reminding us of the broader challenges for economic development in remote resource peripheries.
There is a growing contemporary body of literature about the 'new mobilities' – increasingly mobile populations and their impacts on local economies, particularly in more sparsely populated areas of developed nations. Much of the focus has been on the 'fly in/fly out' workforce associated with mining projects, but attention has also been paid to increasing numbers of 'fly in/fly out' workers in the health sector, the changing nature of tourist populations, the use of temporary contract labour for government administration, and the movement of Indigenous people from remote communities into urban centres. This paper uses five case examples in South Australia and the Northern Territory (Australia's 'spine') to examine the diversity of experiences of the new mobilities. The paper presents a framework for investigating new mobilities at the local settlement level through developing an understanding of macro and micro factors driving mobility and the consequences in terms of aspects of social and economic distance between mobile populations and host communities. The framework provides for useful insights to be drawn from secondary data sources including the Australian Census and tourist surveys. The paper concludes that the geographic characteristics of short term mobility observed in this research essentially conform to the 'Eight Ds' model of the human and economic geography of sparsely populated areas.
Large parts of the Scandinavian Arctic and sub-Arctic are characterized by small settlements of just a few dozen or hundred inhabitants. Many of these villages have experienced loss of population and services. However, recent in-migration and new technologies facilitating ageing in place and e-commute work have seen some villages grow, some stabilize their population base, and many undergo dramatic demographic transformation. These local processes have largely been hidden from policy-makers and planners because standard statistical analyses and demographic modeling are either only applied at regional level, or are poorly suited to such small populations. This chapter introduces an agent-based demographic model (ABDM) applied to small villages in the north of Sweden. ABDMs provide a way to combine quantitative and qualitative data about demographic change processes and model the impacts of these on population size, structure, and dynamics over time. This chapter presents examples of how ABDMs provide insights into demographic change in the northern inland of Sweden and how they might facilitate truly local-level planning in a peripheral Arctic context.
The Eight Ds model (Carson and Carson 2014) explains the unique characteristics of human and economic geography for sparsely populated areas (SPAs) as disconnected, discontinuous, diverse, detailed, dynamic, distant, dependent and delicate. According to the model, SPAs are subject to dramatic changes in demographic characteristics that result from both identifiable black swan events and less apparent tipping points in longer-term processes of demographic change (Carson et al. 2011). The conceptual foundations for this assertion are clear. Populations in SPAs can experience large and long-term impacts on the overall demographic structureas a result of decisions by a relatively small number of people. High levels of migration and mobility cause constant shifts in the demographic profile and prime SPAs to adapt to many different demographic states (Carson and Carson 2014). The Northern Territory of Australia, for example, experienced previously unseen waves of pre-retirement aged migrants in the past decade or so (Martel et al. 2013) as evidence of detailed but important changes to past trends. However, while dramatic demographic changes are conceptually possible and occasionally observable, there have been few attempts to examine the conditions under which such changes are likely to occur or not to occur. This is an important question particularly in relation to black swan events such as natural disasters because effective disaster management policy and planning is at least partially dependent on understanding who is affected and in what ways (Bird et al. 2013).
The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to begin the process of identifying the conditions under which dramatic demographic responses to natural disasters in SPAs might occur. In the process, we introduce two new 'Ds' with which to describe the nature of demographic change. We propose that natural disasters such as cyclones, floods, earthquakes, bushfires, landslides, avalanches and crop failures present the potential to disrupt or to divert demographic development.
Small villages in northern Sweden have seen a continuing removal of key services, such as schools, shops and public transport, since the 1970s. Disinvestment in public services has not been strategically planned but has happened in response to population loss and increased costs on a case-by-case basis. More recently, there has been a shift in policy thinking to what might be termed a ‘de-growth’ approach where digitalisation and increased personal mobility are used to provide new ways of delivering services. The purpose of this paper is to examine the existence of ‘resource deserts’ in Southern Lapland and the emergence (or consolidation) of village hierarchies in allocating public services. We map out the distribution of neighbourhood services (grocery stores, pre-/schools and petrol pumps) among villages, and explore the lived experiences in accessing these resources in different villages. Our results show that resource deserts clearly exist in the south and east of the region, while villages in the more sparsely populated western mountain areas were generally in a better position to retain resources. We identify a lack of consistent and transparent service planning at the village level as a key shortcoming in municipal and regional service strategies. There appear to be unofficial settlement hierarchies in the differential treatment of villages that are otherwise similar in population size, population change and distance to central places. We find that political decisions on service allocations are likely influenced by several factors. These include legacy effects relating to historic settlement status, the location of villages in relation to key transport or mobility corridors, as well as ideological factors favouring villages with more ‘exotic’ features and development potential in line with the municipalities’ economic, social and political priorities. We finally argue that a shift to de-growth needs to be more strategically planned if it is to eliminate resource deserts and promote equity of service access across all villages.
Recent research has identified a series of human geography impacts of natural resource developments in sparsely populated areas like the Arctic. These impacts can be mapped to the 'resource cycle', and arise from periods of population growth and decline, changing patterns of human migration and mobility, changing patterns of settlement, and changes in the demographic 'balance' between males and females, young and old, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. This paper examines the applicability of the resource cycle model in the case of hydro energy development in the Jokkmokk municipality of Sweden. Using quantitative demographic data, media reports, and contemporary accounts of hydro development, the paper describes the human geography of Jokkmokk since the late 19th century. The paper concludes that changes in human geography in Jokkmokk mirror what has been observed in regions dependent on non-renewable resources, although it is difficult to distinguish many impacts from those that might have occurred under alternative development scenarios. The paper identifies a 'settlement cycle' with phases of integrated and separated habitation for populations specifically associated with the development. Settlement dynamics, and the impacts of hydro on Sami geography are areas for further research.
Many sparsely populated resource peripheries in developed countries are perceived to suffer from periods of demographic decline due to loss of employment opportunities and services, youth out-migration and population ageing. While these trends tend to apply at broad regional scales and for particular time periods, diverse patterns of demographic change may be apparent if different spatial, temporal and social scales of analysis are taken into consideration. Comparing the experiences of two case study regions in northern Sweden and inland South Australia, this paper proposes an alternative conceptual framework to the ‘discourse of decline’, which could be used to examine the nuances of demographic change within resource peripheries. The framework includes spatial scale considerations that contrast broader regional demographic patterns with the experiences of sub-regions and individual settlements. It also includes temporal scale aspects, examining demographic change over different time periods to understand the pace, duration and frequency of population growth and decline. The framework finally includes social unit considerations, emphasising that demographic change affects different social groups in different ways. The results of the case studies suggest that considering demographic change as adaptation or transformation rather than decline may be more useful for identifying new – and qualitatively different – demographic pathways that emerge over time.
The paper proposes a model explaining how ‘problem tourists’ emerge at tourism destinations. Problem tourists are incompatible with the accepted dominant status of tourism and emerge from social distance between tourists and hosts, or between different groups of tourists. A case study of long grassers in Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, is presented to illustrate the model. Long grassers are popularly understood as Indigenous people from remote communities who camp in public places during their visits to Darwin and engage in anti-social behaviours. Surveys were conducted on travel patterns of long grassers to better understand their behaviours and interactions with the destination. This paper discusses whether conceptualising long grassers as problem tourists might help reveal new management strategies.
This paper proposes a model of how Indigenous communities may engage with the mining sector to better manage local development impacts and influence governance processes. The model uses a resource lifecycle perspective to identify the various development opportunities and challenges that remote Indigenous communities and stakeholders may face at different stages of the mining project. The model is applied to two case studies located in the Northern Territory of Australia (Gove Peninsula and Ngukurr) which involved different types and scales of mining and provided different opportunities for development and governance engagement for surrounding Indigenous communities. Both cases emphasise how the benefits and burdens associated with mining, as well as the bridges between Indigenous and outsider approaches to development and governance, can change very quickly due to the volatile nature of remote mining operations. There is thus a need for more flexible agreements and more dynamic relationships between Indigenous, mining and other governance stakeholders that can be adjusted and renegotiated as the conditions for mining change. The final discussion reflects on how the model may be applied in the context mining governance and Indigenous stakeholder engagement in the Fennoscandian north.
Background: This scoping review identifies strategies potentially addressing the ‘workforce crisis’ in rural social care. The increasing global demand for social care has been coupled with widely recognised challenges in recruiting and retaining sufficient staff to provide this care. While the social care workforce crisis is a global phenomenon, it is particularly acute in rural areas.
Methods: The review identified 75 papers which (i) had been published since 2017, (ii) were peer reviewed, (iii) concerned social care, (iv) were relevant to rural settings, (v) referenced workforce shortages, and (vi) made recommendations for ways to address those shortages. Thematic synthesis was used to derive three analytical themes with a combined 17 sub-themes applying to recommended strategies and evidence supporting those strategies.
Results: The most common strategies for addressing social care workforce shortages were to improve recruitment and retention (‘recruit and retain’) processes without materially changing the workforce composition or service models. Further strategies involved ‘revitalising’ the social care workforce through redeploying existing staff or identifying new sources of labour. A small number of strategies involved ‘re-thinking’ social care service models more fundamentally. Very few papers specifically considered how these strategies might apply to rural contexts, and evidence for the effectiveness of strategies was sparse.
Conclusion: The review identifies a significant gap in the literature in relation to workforce innovation and placed-based studies in rural social care systems. It is unlikely that the social care workforce crisis can be addressed through continuing attempts to recruit and retain workers within existing service models.
This chapter examines two myths affecting development of the health and care workforce in places like the rural north of Sweden. The first is that 'rural health' is primarily concerned with medical care, and the second is that the major challenge facing rural health and care systems is population ageing. We argue that a focus on ageing populations leads to a workforce that is poorly equipped to deal with the needs of youth, Indigenous people, migrants and others. Further, a workforce focused on medical care is limited in capacity to provide holistic and coordinated care for rural residents. We acknowledge that demanding a more knowledgeable and better prepared health and care workforce will increase the challenges of recruitment and retention, but this needs to be balanced against the benefits of having a 'socially accountable' workforce.
Understanding the processes of demographic change is critical for economic and services planning. Often times, planning in ‘rural’ areas is based on an assumption of homogenous populations and drivers of change (ageing, declining traditional rural industries, adaptation to changing environments and so on). This article argues that attention to spatial, social and temporal scales reveals great diversity between places and within places with regards to demographic change and economic potential. We use evidence from seemingly incomparable case examples from the Alpine villages of Austria and the remote Indigenous communities of Australia to demonstrate that differences in mobility over time and between social groups results in very different experiences of local economies. Specifically, social groups (and individuals) experience the local within their own actor-networks. The article examines how the diverse experiences of the local might be measured, and why they are important for ‘local’ policy making and planning. The research is grounded in theories of social and human geography around ‘fragmented development’, actor-network theory and scale.
In 1960, a range of leading rural geographers started a debate about population development and the “advance and retreat” of human settlement in sparsely populated rural areas, including in the inland north of Sweden. In what came to be known as the “Siljan Symposium,” they identified a number of key themes in relation to migration and human mobility that were thought to determine settlement patterns in the inland north, including: internal migration and urbanisation of populations; the role of simultaneous in- and out-migration in re-shaping settlement patterns; redistribution of rural populations through return migration and international migration; and changing preferences for settlement in different northern “zones” based on the methods for exploiting natural resources for agriculture, forestry, mining and energy production. This paper re-visits the main themes from the 1960 Siljan Symposium and examines Swedish register data to identify how migration patterns and the resulting “advance and retreat” of human settlement have changed across the inland of Västerbotten and Norrbotten. The results suggest that, while general urban-rural and regional- local settlement patterns appear to have been relatively consistent, new forms of migration (including internal, return and international) with different preferences for rural settlement emerging in different localities as a result of both persistent (mining, forestry, energy) and changing (tourism, lifestyle) values of natural resources. We also observe substantial differences in migration and urbanisation rates between Norrbotten and Västerbotten. The paper then discusses how the persistence and discontinuity of experiences over the past decades may provide insights into the potential future patterns of northern settlement.
The purpose of this research is to investigate the extent to which Australia's northern cities have become increasingly important mediators of migration of nurses and general practitioners (GPs) to the regional north since the 1980s. Over that period, national and provincial policy has focused on ‘regionalisation’ of health workforce development, including creating education and training infrastructure outside of metropolitan areas. This paper hypothesises that the effectiveness of regionalisation in northern Australia should be reflected in an increased net flow of GPs and nurses from northern cities (which are the hubs of education and training) to the regional north. Data from the seven Australian Census between 1986 and 2016 are used to model changing patterns of migration. Overall, there was limited evidence of substantial change in migration patterns, although for GPs there was a reduction in migration from the key metropolitan source markets (Brisbane and Adelaide) matching an increase in supply from northern cities. Northern cities have consistently been the source of about one quarter of new nurse and GP migrants to the regional north, but the regional north has become a much less favoured destination for professionals leaving northern cities as cities' populations have grown much faster than regional populations. Net flows have remained small and for nurses have favoured the cities while for GPs favoured the regional north. The paper concludes that, while there is limited evidence of increased ‘spillover’ of labour from the cities to the regional north, there is also no evidence of the cities increasingly ‘spongeing’ regional labour. Cities and regional migration systems may be increasingly disconnected as labour demands diverge, but new connections are being created with the rest of non-metropolitan Australia. The research is the first to analyse health professional migration over such a long period, and contributes to the debates about the roles of cities in sparsely populated areas in the development of their rural and remote hinterlands.
Research on the demographic impacts of mining in sparsely populated areas has focused primarily on relatively large towns. Less attention has been paid to smaller villages, which may experience different impacts because of their highly concentrated economies and their small populations, making them more vulnerable to demographic “boom and bust” effects. This paper examines demographic change in four small villages in northern Sweden, which are located close to several mining projects but have evolved through different degrees of integration with or separation from mining. Using a longitudinal “resource cycle” perspective, the demographic trajectories of the villages are compared to understand how different types of settlement and engagement with mining have led to different demographic outcomes in the long term. While the four villages experienced similar trajectories in terms of overall population growth and decline, their experiences in relation to more nuanced indicators, including age and gender distributions and population mobilities, were different, and potential reasons for this are discussed. Due to data limitations, however, the long-term demographic consequences of mining for local Sami people remain unclear. The paper problematises this research gap in light of general concerns about mining impacts on traditional Sami livelihoods.
Objectives: We examine the role of "local actors" and "local action" (LALA) in health service innovation in high-resource small rural settings and aim to inform debates about the extent to which communities can be empowered to drive change in service design and delivery.
Methods: Using an adapted roles and activities framework we analyzed 32 studies of innovation projects in public health, clinical interventions, and service models.
Results: Rural communities can investigate, lead, own and sustain innovation projects. However, there is a paucity of research reflecting limited reporting capacity and/or understanding of LALA. Highlighting this lack of evidence strengthens the need for study designs that enable an analysis of LALA.
Conclusion: Innovation and community participation in health services are pressing issues in small rural settings where population size and distance from health infrastructure make service delivery challenging. Current reviews of community participation in rural health give little insight into the process of innovation nor understanding of how local actors produce improvements in innovation. This review outlines how communities and institutions can harness the essential role of LALA in supporting health innovations.
The major advance in informing rural workforce policy internationally over the past 25 years has been the recognition of the importance of the 'rural pipeline'. The rural pipeline suggests that people with 'rural origin' (who spent some childhood years in rural areas) and/or 'rural exposure' (who do part of their professional training in rural areas) are more likely to select rural work locations. What is not known is whether the rural pipeline also increases the length of time professionals spend in rural practice throughout their careers. This paper analyses data from a survey of rural health professionals in six countries in the northern periphery of Europe in 2013 to examine the relationship between rural origin and rural exposure and the intention to remain in the current rural job or to preference rural jobs in future. Results are compared between countries, between different types of rural areas (based on accessibility to urban centres), different occupations and workers at different stages of their careers. The research concludes that overall the pipeline does impact on retention, and that both rural origin and rural exposure make a contribution. However, the relationship is not strong in all contexts, and health workforce policy should recognise that retention may in some cases be improved by recruiting beyond the pipeline.
Settlements at the Edge examines the evolution, characteristics, functions and shifting economic basis of settlements in sparsely populated areas of developed nations. With a focus on demographic change, the book features theoretical and applied cases which explore the interface between demography, economy, well-being and the environment. This book offers a comprehensive and insightful knowledge base for understanding the role of population in shaping the development and histories of northern sparsely populated areas of developed nations including Alaska (USA), Australia, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Finland and other nations with territories within the Arctic Circle.
Chapter 2 discusses the changes in habitation or human geography, contextualizing the idea of a sparsely populated region with in fact great variation, from large coastal cities down to the village level. The chapter illustrates that even villages close to each other and with similar economic or other backgrounds can come to vary vastly, depending on factors that are not accessible within a pure demographic context, and questions the use of a sparsely populated area assumption, which may make areas seem unitary in their development.
There are a number challenges to maintaining high-quality policy capacity in sparsely populated areas such as Australia's Northern Territory (e.g. natural resource dependent economy, prominence of Indigenous issues, provision of local services). Moreover, the Territory government has recently been undergoing a host of public sector changes. This paper utilises survey methodologies of policy workers that were recently developed in Canada and examines nine risk factors to policy work. A survey of 119 policy workers in the Northern Territory was conducted in 2013. The analysis examined four key policy-work areas (policy activities, barriers, areas for improved policy capacity, nature of change in work environment). The survey findings offer some practical insights for managers. Formal policy-work training is recognised as critical. Policy capacity may be increased through better inter-departmental (and potentially inter-governmental) cooperation and information sharing, more opportunities to engage with non-governmental stakeholders, and more opportunities for those leaving the full-time Northern Territory policy workforce to continue to contribute. From a conceptual point of view, the extent to which policy capacity' as commonly conceived in the literature is applicable to contexts, such as Australia's Northern Territory, warrants further examination.
Hospital to home transfers for older people require effective communication, coordination and collaboration across multiple service settings. Rural Nursing Theory and the Beyond Periphery model explain why this is particularly difficult in rural areas, but there are few examples of how rural services respond. This paper presents a case study of the district of Tärnaby in the inland north of Sweden. Data are drawn from interviews with health and care staff in Tärnaby, observations, and experiences of the researchers. Data were analyzed thematically, with four main themes emerging–role clarity, communication, geography, and understanding of the rural context. Responses to challenges included increasing opportunities for communication between service providers and improving documentation. The paper concludes that informal "workarounds" run the risk of further disconnecting rural service settings from "the city". Rather, the aim needs to be to improve contextual understanding through formally incorporating "the rural" in service design.
New economic opportunities in remote areas are often linked to major private and public sector investment projects which are controlled by external decision-makers and lead to temporary periods of economic ‘boom’. Settlements in sparsely populated or remote areas in countries such as Australia, Canada, the United States and the Arctic European nations, are commonly perceived to be inherently disadvantaged socially and economically because of their isolation from social services, economic and political power centres [Carson et al., 2011; Huskey, 2011]. Even when economic opportunities present for a number of remote locations as a result of the mineral and oil and gas resources ‘booms’, the benefits are believed to accrue primarily to distant large urban centres where resource extraction companies are based [Argent, 2013]. Income derived from employment in the resources sector is channelled away from sparsely populated areas by the use of non-resident and temporarily resident labour, with little in the way of local employment [Carrington and Pereira, 2011]. Through a series of case studies of small settlements in remote parts of Alaska, Huskey (2011) demonstrated that local engagement in various economic activities is possible and can deliver local social and economic benefit. This research examines Husky’s arguments about the potential for sustainable local economic development through a case study of a small and isolated settlement, Tennant Creek, in Australia’s Northern Territory. By analysing local labour changes from 2001 to 2011, the research examined the town’s capacity to mobilise its labour force and diversify in response to new opportunities offered by a range of economic ‘booms’ in the mining, construction, transport, tourism, health, education and government service sectors. This brief is a summary of a full research paper which is published in the journal Bulletin Buryat State University: Inner Asia Studies in the Humanities (Carson & Carson, 2013).
Purpose – The aim of this paper is to synthesise three separate but similar studies into the motivations of accountants, engineers, and nurses to come to Australia’s Northern Territory. Gordon’s job structures model and the labour force development implications of staples thesis are to be used to provide a view of the differences between types of jobs.
Design/methodology/approach – Separate surveys of accountants, engineers and nurses registered in the Northern Territory were conducted in 2006 and 2007. Similarities in design between the studies allowed comparisons to be made regarding responses to questions about motives to move to the Northern Territory. Comparisons between the job groups were made on the basis of responses to individual motives, and a principal components analysis was used to identify groups of motives.
Findings – Nurses were more likely than engineers to be motivated to work with indigenous people and by their own family and social issues. Accountants were similar to engineers with regards to working with indigenous people, and similar to nurses with regards to family and social migration motives.
Practical implications – Growing the professional workforce in the Northern Territory is a prominent government policy objective. This study shows that different approaches to recruitment need to be taken with workers in different professions.
Originality/value – One of the weaknesses in existing academic literature on recruitment and retention of professionals in rural and remote areas is a lack of studies comparing rural migration motives of labour employed in different types of jobs. This study covers those aspects of the field.
It has been well documented that Indigenous populations in developed ‘postcolonial’ nations (such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States) experience disadvantage in a number of areas when compared with their non-Indigenous counterparts. Despite (or perhaps because of) a range of policy initiatives and political approaches to addressing disadvantage, there continues to be poor understandings of what 'works' and under what conditions. There is a body of literature which compares conditions, political ideas and policy initiatives across the jurisdictions, but the bases for comparison are poorly described; there is insufficient linking of research into ‘ideas’ with research into initiatives and their outcomes, and there is insufficient engagement of Indigenous people in the research. This paper proposes a more rigorous approach to comparative research that is based on principals of partnership with and participation of Indigenous people. We conclude that well designed participatory comparative research can not only provide new insights to old problems, but can improve Indigenous people's access to global knowledge systems.
Objective: To establish a baseline of levels of Indigenous professional engagement in the health and community services sector in remote Northern Territory.
Design: Analysis of data from 2001 and 2006 Census.
Setting: Northern Territory – Balance Statistical Division.
Participants: Persons employed in health and community services sector in 2006.
Main outcome measures: Indigenous status, level of education, current education status, occupation type and residential mobility.
Results: Indigenous employment grew by 137% between 2001 and 2006. In 2006, 42% of Indigenous employees were labourers and 9% professionals, in contrast to non‐Indigenous workers of whom 41% were professionals and 5% labourers. Over 50% of workers who moved into the region between 2001 and 2006 were professionals, compared with 20% of those who had remained in the region. Indigenous in‐migrants were twice as likely as Indigenous people who had stayed in the region to be professionals. Indigenous workers were much less likely to have post‐school educational qualifications than non‐Indigenous workers. Indigenous workers were also less likely to be studying for a post‐school qualification. Indigenous in‐migrants were three times as likely to have post‐school qualifications than Indigenous people who had remained in the region and were also more likely to be enrolled in post‐school education.
Conclusions: The baseline is low Indigenous engagement as professional labour, and low Indigenous engagement in formal education. Mobile Indigenous people have higher levels of engagement. The situation might be addressed by increased formal education in remote areas and increased mobility of Indigenous health labour.
Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory, faces urban planning challenges consistent with those reported in ‘resource peripheries’ around the world. The city has recently experienced strong population growth associated with resources and construction projects, and an increase in public sector workers sent to address the challenges faced by remote (particularly Indigenous) populations. The Northern Territory Government is determined to foster further growth, and promotes ‘major projects’ in urban development as the key. Analysis of the public debates about two recent major projects (the Waterfront Development and the Lyons residential development) reveal a planning process consistent with the clientelism observed by Rayner and Howlett (2009) in resource peripheries in Canada. The risks of clientelism are both the marginalisation of important internal publics and the institutionalisation of ‘temporariness’ as the driver of growth. Shifting to a more consultative planning process might help stimulate internal development, but could also put at risk the relationships that the Northern Territory Government has established with external investors.
This paper discusses the contributions of international lifestyle immigrants to new tourism development and innovation in the sparsely populated north of Sweden. Based on a qualitative case study, the paper examines how lifestyle immigrants contributed as tourism entrepreneurs to the formation of local capital in tourism, and stimulated local learning and innovation spillover through networks of interaction and collaboration. The theoretical framework integrates concepts from rural lifestyle migration, local community development, and local tourism innovation systems. The results document how immigrants emerged as important drivers of new tourism products, processes and markets, and introduced a range of new ideas, skills and external networks to the region. Yet, an in-depth social network analysis reveals that immigrants made more limited contributions to networks, collaborations and knowledge exchange with local tourism stakeholders, thus limiting learning outcomes and innovation spillover at a broader local system level. Reasons for this lack of systemic interaction included socio-cultural distance between immigrants and locals, limited levels of trust and reciprocity, diverging development and lifestyle priorities, and issues around exclusive immigrant networking. Finally, the relevance of the theoretical framework is discussed in relation to its applicability to other immigrant mobilities in sparsely populated rural areas.
This chapter examines the opportunities and barriers for de-growth to be used in future tourism development strategies for remote or peripheral destinations, illustrated by the case of the Top End region in the Northern Territory of Australia. In such remote contexts, tourism has often evolved around an entrenched boosterist growth paradigm, a dependence on export markets and external investors, a susceptibility to 'boom and bust' cycles, and increasing spatial and social inequalities between the dominant urban growth centre and a declining sparsely populated hinterland. The chapter discusses how de-growth may help in reducing the city-hinterland development gap by directing attention to the benefits of alternative niche markets, the regional dispersal of tourists, smaller-scale and dispersed infrastructure and product investment, a re-positioning of tourism as part of broader community development agendas, and renewed efforts to encourage local involvement in decision-making. The chapter also considers the institutional barriers to such an approach, and considers why it may remain an unrealistic concept for remote political economies that are increasingly confronted with recurring periods of economic crisis and highly volatile industries and populations.
This article introduces the special issue ‘Rural hinterland development in sparsely populated areas (SPAs): new challenges and opportunities arising from urbanisation within the periphery’. It problematises the relationships between growing cities and hinterland areas in SPAs, such as those commonly found in Arctic, Outback and similar remote resource peripheries of developed countries. Many SPAs are rapidly urbanising, with polarised development becoming an ever-increasing concern for regional planners and policy-makers. This special issue contributes to debates about the impact that urban growth and city-centric development strategies in SPAs might have on the development prospects for small and distant settlements in the hinterland. We first discuss why SPAs are different from other rural contexts when it comes to urban-rural interactions and introduce the idea of regional disconnectedness as a defining feature of SPAs. We then review the papers in this collection, which include perspectives from northern Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Scotland, Alaska, and Australia, and position them according to their contributions to theory, policy and practice. The special issue challenges assumptions that city-centric regional development in SPAs will automatically generate spillover or backwash effects for the hinterland. It emphasises the need to consider diverse mobility flows within SPAs as part of urban-rural interactions. It also raises attention to micro-scale urbanisation within the hinterland, with housing, services, and amenities increasingly concentrating in a few small towns. The final discussion outlines important areas for research into more effective urban-rural partnership building in SPAs and on how to embrace regional disconnectedness for more targeted hinterland development.
Tourism destinations in peripheral areas are often large regions established by centralised government agencies to encourage collaboration between dispersed communities and foster innovation. Relatively little research attention has been paid to the impact that centrally defined destination boundaries have on whether and how small communities contribute to innovation at a regional level. This paper examines the case of Burra, a small town in rural South Australia. It analyses the networking, collaboration and knowledge exchange behaviour of tourism stakeholders in the context of the state-government-defined 'Clare Valley' tourism region. Data were drawn from a web-based social network analysis, in-depth interviews, historic document analysis and field observations. The study found that the local tourism system had limited aspirations and capabilities to collaborate with other towns in the region. Lack of regional engagement was only partially due to intra-regional competition and resistance to regional boundaries. More significant barriers included a local culture of operating in isolation, an embedded reliance on public sector leadership to manage systemic interactions, an aging system with limited ambition to change and an inability to harness in-migrants and externally based stakeholders to stimulate knowledge transfer. Changing the imposed destination boundaries would have limited impact on the operation of the local system. The paper concludes that effective regional destination development in peripheral areas needs to be better informed by more detailed understandings of local tourism systems and their capacities to engage.