Determining the ‘public interest' in contested landscapes: Who determines what it is and how it is determined?

Contestation over land rights and expectations of use can reflect a broader lack of understanding about how multiple and potentially competing rights are represented within legislative and planning frameworks. For example, the rights of multiple stakeholders to access and exploit both surface development and underground mineral rights in a contested landscape. In Australia, intensification of competition for land use between the resource extraction and agricultural industries led the Queensland Government to release a policy framework for protecting the state’s strategic cropping land for public comment in August 2010. The intention of the policy is to protect land identified for strategic cropping use from any development that may alienate it or diminish productivity, except in “special circumstances” where there is a “significant public interest benefit”. Many of the submissions to this process questioned not only the concept of public interest in land but also who determines what the public interest is and what decision making frameworks would be used for calculating trade-offs between different land values. In this paper, we adopt the novel approach of examining the public submissions to the ‘Strategic Cropping Lands’ policy development consultative process and the Queensland Government’s responses to the concerns raised. Using this information we explore how public participation might be better integrated into the policy development process in order to determine ‘best’ value land uses in the case of current conflict between the extractive industries and agricultural cropping activities in Queensland, Australia. Thus we use this recent policy example to explore a mode of environmental citizenship that might use public participation to mobilise more deliberative forms of engagement that have greater capacity to deal meaningfully with issues of knowledge, risk judgements, cooperation and trust that underpin these land use conflicts.