Future forestry employment and education

Formal and informal rules create an institutional framework that governs the operations of a democratic society. They require various forms of organisational structures to implement them. These are the oft-forgotten links in sustainable forest management and good forest governance. This paper examines some of the major causal influences that have shaped and are shaping institutional frameworks and supporting organisations in Australia and that are likely to influence forestry employment and education. These include sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary, influences between state and corporate forestry, industrial and smallholder forestry, in-house expertise and contracting out, regulation and certification, and decentralisation and centralisation. Because institutional change is often largely a political response to satisfy different constituents, change is likely to continue, with increasing diversity in the resulting organisations and complexity in their interactions. Competitive market processes will increasingly replace bureaucratic allocation and management wherever commercial products and services are supplied or wherever potentially commercial services can be hived off from state departments. Almost every conceivable combination now exists in the organisational structures responsible for state forestry policy, regulation, commercial timber management, reserve management, research and fire management across the different states of Australia. The greatest challenge for forestry education in Australia is whether the gulf in the mutual perceptions of the major timber management and reserve management organisations can be bridged to take advantage of the mutual concerns while acknowledging and respecting the differences. Forestry education needs revision to deal with the demands for core subjects and specialisation, the roles of kindred education courses, manageable costs, and the differing needs of polity in relation to forestry.