Rural research and regional innovation: Are past and present research funding policies building future resilience in the bush?

Introduction Over millennia, Australia’s traditional owners found ways to adapt to the harsh and diverse environments of the Australian continent. This adaptation process no doubt involved trial and error, the use of human imagination and creativity to go beyond the bounds of the known, the collaboration of expertise and the sharing of knowledge through stories. If you could fold time, compress this experience, encrypt the process, codify the learning practice, box it up and label it, then the label might read ‘Rural Research: Institutionalised for the Modern World.’ The author would add, ‘Handle with Care. Not Guaranteed Against Defect.’ Over the past 200 years, Australian farmers and the communities dependent upon them have relied upon institutionalised research in order to adapt to harsh Australian landscapes. The term institutionalised here is used in two senses: first, the codification of research practice through formal methods of experimentation; and second, the creation of organisations, laws, policies and funding mechanisms to support, undertake and communicate research and its findings. The subject of this chapter is the latter, now valued to be at least $2.9 billion per annum (RRDC 2011, p. 3) and considered relatively novel and worthy of emulation elsewhere around the globe (Price 1994; Lovett 1997). In visioning the future of rural and regional Australia, particularly within the context of the role of government and analysis of key policy developments since World War II, Australian rural research can proudly hold its place. Just as this research effort has sought to make Australian agriculture and rural communities resilient to the exigencies of highly variable terrain, climate and markets, the evolution of rural research policy too can be seen in the light of formulating support mechanisms resilient to farmers’ capacity to pay for innovation and inter-sectoral competition for public research funds. There are many forms of knowledge and many means of generating it. Visioning the future does not require institutionalised research (see Gross, this volume, for example), but creating the means of attaining a preferred future will certainly rely on forms of creativity, collaboration and knowledgegeneration that policies and institutions can potentially facilitate. Whether or not this potential can be realised in terms of achieving resilience in rural and regional Australia will depend on how the research agenda is set and who is involved.