The Murraylands & Riverland Plan
The MR Plan focuses on innovative ways to bring together community, industry and government, to develop a vision and an enduring regional voice.
What is the Murraylands & Riverland Plan?
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.
The Process:
The Murraylands and Riverland Plan (MR Plan) is about supporting our region to develop enduring regional resilience.
The planning process will follow a strong evidence-base to further the economic, social and environmental interests of the Murraylands, Mallee and Riverland towards achieving this vision.
Developed in partnership with the Murraylands and Riverland Local Government Association (MRLGA), the Murraylands and Riverland Landscape Board (MRLB) and Regional Development Australia Murraylands and Riverland (RDAMR), the planning process is guided by a local and expert Steering Committee, that recognised the need to identify a diverse regional network, formal and informal, that span our Murraylands, Mallee and Riverland region, including people across industry, social services, the unemployed, the self-employed, families, friends, churches, sporting and service clubs, live-in, work-in, artistic groups, committee representatives and more.
The Experts
This project is part of the Regional Drought Resilience Planning Program and is funded through the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund and the Government of South Australia.
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.
Our Action – Based on community feedback
We want to develop an adaptive, networked, leadership development system in the region, that brings diverse people together to generate pace-based solutions.
An Interest Panel Participant from the MR Plan
