Law and Management

Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities

Research Projects

Post-doctoral Research: Farmer Decision Making Strategies

Investigator:

• Dr Quentin Farmar-Bowers

Quentin Farmar-Bowers is continuing to develop the decision-systems theory which he started working on in 2002. The theory has a systems-thinking framework and describes farmers’ strategic decision-making from the perspective of the farming family. Strategic-decisions are those that are maintained by farmers for a very long time and represent strategies rather than day-to-day decisions. The initial work focused on farmers’ natural resource management (NRM) particularly the maintenance of native vegetation on farm properties.

The theory shows that farmers make decisions on NRM from different decision-systems and this alters what farmers see as competitive decisions to their NRM decisions. Applying the decision-systems theory to policy development could help policy analysts develop policies that encourage farmers to improve their NRM decisions in specific decision systems. Policies to encourage NRM decisions in different decision-system are quite different and have different benefits.

Quentin’s work in the next two years will include more in-depth interviews with farming families. He wants to undertake these interviews with a range of farming families, preferable in different regions and would be happy to collaborate with other workers in the field.

Reports and papers on this work are available on the website of the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment Drivers of Land Use Change Project and through the Melbourne University e-Prints Repository.