A cybernetic approach to land management issues

Abstract

This work is a digital version of a dissertation that was first submitted in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in March 1994. The work was concerned with problems of self-organisation and organisation ranging from local to global levels of hierarchy. It considers organisations as living entities from local to global things that a living entity – more particularly, an individual, a body corporate or a body politic - must know and do to maintain an existence – that is to remain viable – or to be sustainable. The term ‘land management’ as used in 1994 was later subsumed into a more general concept of ‘natural resource management’ and then merged with ideas about sustainable socioeconomic and sustainable ecological development.

The cybernetic approach contains many cognitive elements of human observation, language and learning that combine into production processes. The approach tends to highlight instances where systems (or organisations) can fail because they have very little chance of succeeding. Thus there are logical necessities as well as technical possibilities in designing, constructing, operating and maintaining production systems that function reliably over extended periods.

Chapter numbers and titles to the original thesis are as follows:
1. Land management as a problem of coping with complexity
2. Background theory in systems theory and cybernetic principles
3. Operationalisation of cybernetic principles in Beer’s Viable System Model
4. Issues in the design of viable cadastral surveying and mapping organisation
5. An analysis of the tendency for fragmentation in surveying and mapping organisation
6. Perambulating the boundaries of Sydney – a problem of social control under poor standards of literacy
7. Cybernetic principles in the process of legislation
8. Closer settlement policy and viability in agricultural production
9. Rate of return in leasing Crown lands