Cross-property collaborations offer novel solutions for dealing with complex, multi-scalar issues, fortifying long-term landscape-scale conservation and increasing viability of production systems. This paper reports on a NSW Environmental Trust funded project ‘Increasing landholder collaboration for landscape scale conservation’, focused on the NSW Central West and Central Tablelands. A participatory rural appraisal, an interviewing process which utilises local people as researchers and involves a series of workshops, was conducted with 55 landholders to explore opportunities. Evidence of cross-property collaboration included biodiversity management, vegetation plantings, fire safety and management, pest and weed control groups, informal sharing/trading of equipment, labour and transport, and informal grazing arrangements. Major barriers to collaboration were lack of time, reluctance to drive collaboration, individualistic mentalities, social dynamics, lack of contact (especially with absentee landholders), lack of perceived benefit, and apprehension about personal liability versus group liability. Opportunities for increased collaboration include habitat connectivity, shared costs for pest and weed management, goat and kangaroo harvesting, shared branding and place-marketing, small-scale mobile production, and eco-tourism for recreation, cultural experience and nature-watching. Steps identified for enabling collaboration include realising synergies with neighbours, learning first-hand from other successful collaborators and using online platforms to share knowledge and ideas.

The provision of biosecurity is a public good. While the need for collective action is often acknowledged, there is little explicit consideration of how collective action can be achieved across different scales, by stakeholders with diverse values, and where the benefits can be difficult to observe or measure. The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which social values and the visibility of contributions affect the achievement of biosecurity across local, regional and national scales. It incorporates the findings of four research projects that have investigated the individual, group and institutional efforts to implement weed hygiene and weed control practices on private and public land in NSW and Victoria. The analysis suggests that social values and networks are as important in limiting effective collective action across scales, as the physical boundaries between private and public land.

Australian legislation and policies have historically framed rural weed management as the responsibility of individual land managers. However, the transboundary nature of weeds means that collective action is more effective than individual action. The social norms affecting weed management interact with governance arrangements to influence adoption of collective action. Previous research highlights how collective natural resource management can be more effective, sustainable and legitimate where governance complements existing local social norms. This paper will discuss how current Victorian weed management governance and social norms can affect the potential for collective action by supporting or interfering with one another. Data for this analysis comes from contemporary documents and semi-structured interviews with 31 landholders from two case studies in rural Victoria, Australia. Governments and other organisations involved in Victorian land management currently encourage both individual and collective action for weed management, but these different sentiments do not match landholders’ views of weed management. Instead, landholders are influenced by social norms that predominantly reinforce a perception of weed management as an individual action problem. For collective weed management to evolve, government policies need to recognise and encourage a shift in individualistic social norms.