Regional development and natural resource management : drawing on the lessons of the United Nations in addressing the Poverty Environmental Nexus

The United Nations and other international aid organisations have invested many millions of dollars exploring how best to build the economic and social fabric of the developing world sustainably. The tools and approaches used have real application elsewhere as they deal with community engagement, governance and institutional reform, the attraction and retention of professionals as well as quality assurance and market competitiveness. While the target market is different from Australia’s regions, the tools used are well defined and tested and have generic application. This paper overviews the issues surrounding 10 case studies undertaken by the UN in the Central Asian and Southern Asian Regions and considers the lessons learned and their application to sustainable regional development and environmental management in Australia.The paper draws on the work of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) technical cooperation project which focused on the widely spread problems of poverty and environmental threats to communities in two of the Asian regions covering five countries each in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) and Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam). The project focuses on institutional capacity building and networking to build sustainable regional communities and economies. Specifically, the project is designed to improve institutional capacity and the articulation of policies and practices for local governance for regional economic development, through community based initiatives. With some innovation and lateral thinking can these well researched tools and processes have applicability to the Australian regional community development context.