The state and trend of the Great Barrier Reef's (GBR's) ecological health remains problematic, influencing United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) statements regarding GBR governance. While UNESCO's concerns triggered separate strategic assessments by the Australian and Queensland governments, there has been no independent and integrated review of the key risks within the overall system of governance influencing GBR outcomes. As a case study of international significance, this paper applies Governance Systems Analysis (GSA), a novel analytical framework that identifies the governance themes, domains and subdomains most likely to influence environmental and socio-economic outcomes in complex natural systems. This GBR-focussed application of GSA identifies governance subdomains that present high, medium, or low risk of failure to produce positive outcomes for the Reef. This enabled us to determine that three "whole of system" governance problems could undermine GBR outcomes. First, we stress the integrative importance of the Long Term Sustainability Plan (LTSP) Subdomain. Sponsored by the Australian and Queensland governments, this subdomain concerns the primary institutional arrangements for coordinated GBR planning and delivery, but due to its recent emergence, it faces several internal governance challenges. Second, we find a major risk of implementation failure in the achievement of GBR water quality actions due to a lack of system-wide focus on building strong and stable delivery systems at catchment scale. Finally, we conclude that the LTSP Subdomain currently has too limited a mandate/capacity to influence several high-risk subdomains that have not been, but must be more strongly aligned with Reef management (e.g. the Greenhouse Gas Emission Management Subdomain). Our analysis enables exploration of governance system reforms needed to address environmental trends in the GBR and reflects on the potential application of GSA in other complex land and sea-scapes across the globe.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 07 October 2016.
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#7,960,512
of 25,374,917 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Environmental Management
#1,943
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Outputs of similar age
#106,634
of 315,129 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Environmental Management
#36
of 116 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,374,917 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 67th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 6,438 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 6.5. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 68% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 116 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 68% of its contemporaries.
