It is 2018 and the 10 year UNESCO review for the Noosa Biosphere Reserve is overdue. It was due last year. It has a number of postponements since. Fortunately UNESCO is not a hard taskmaster.
My own involvement with UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MaB) programme, which covered most of the Noosa Biosphere’s first 10 years, has come to an end. It’s an opportunity for me to offer a personal review of those years and provide a bit of background and insight about why we parted ways.
Background
In 2006, I left a successful career in London’s digital industry and moved to Noosa for family reasons. I mainly worked in Melbourne but volunteered as a catalyst in Noosa’s Creative Class project – which later became the Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance.
When the Biosphere project kicked off, I knew I could contribute professional expertise in design collaboration and a lifelong passion for sustainability. Coincidentally my hometown in Germany had become a very successful biosphere reserve.
I was drawn to everything ‘biospherical’, from Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and the 1970s style Biosphere 2 project in Arizona to the modern Eden Project in the UK. I liked the idea of a ‘contained’ space with boundaries of sorts in which human interventions could be measured.
It is important to know that the UNESCO Biosphere status provides neither funding nor a prescriptive process. It is up to the community to develop and implement a plan for governance and action.
In Europe, successful biosphere reserve programs are usually well-funded and supported by various levels of government and have helped create networks of sustainable development, particularly in tourism, while protecting and enhancing biodiversity. Successful reserves reconcile conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable human use.
However, nothing could have prepared me for how an innocuous and academic Biosphere concept would play out in Noosa and how aggressively contested and ultimately divisive it would become.
Battlefield
The first biosphere organisation, Noosa Biosphere Limited (NBL), was a company originally set up and operated by the previous Noosa Council prior to the 2008 council amalgamation. After amalgamation, it came under the administration of the newly amalgamated Sunshine Coast Council. Both Noosa and Sunshine Coast councils funded it in their respective terms of office and both had sincere intentions to retain Noosa’s homegrown operational structure, based on sector boards, whilst working towards UNESCO Biosphere objectives.
The NBL was intended to operate above parochial politics and to collaborate with all levels of government to give consistency and longevity to its programs.
As with all new organisations, the NBL faced many challenges. It overcame some and struggled with others, but it was undoubtedly strong on process, transparency and accountability – which are crucial to the integrity of a publicly funded organisation. Most remarkably, over the years it increasingly engaged women and younger people.
Right from the start, a small group of Noosa ‘stalwarts’ associated with the Noosa Parks Association accused the NBL and its collaborators of impropriety, failure, cronyism (nepotism), lack of transparency and so forth – often with personal smears.
This toxic but strategically clever group believed (and still do) that they are the only and true leaders of the Noosa community and the Biosphere is rightfully theirs. But apart from hurling rocks, for around seven years this group failed to progress their vision.
They refused to contribute in a meaningful and civil way to Biosphere initiatives preferring to sabotage them. Historically their strategic skill (characterised by belligerence) has, by their own estimation, shaped Noosa.
Anybody standing in their way became ‘roadkill for the greater good’, as they saw it. These ‘stalwarts’ have largely written Noosa’s history from their own perspective and, in combination with Noosa’s transient, churning and largely unassuming population, until now it has been a successful recipe .
A forced restart
In 2014 the newly de-amalgamated Noosa Council dismantled NBL and set up a new structure in its place. One of the objectives was to give the Biosphere back to ‘the community’. This was ultimately manipulated by some members of council and background associates to gradually move control of the Biosphere to those who had sought to assault it.
The transendent of the newly formed organisations was the Noosa Biosphere Reserve Foundation (NBRF or ‘the Foundation’), a charity and trustee of a public trust. The new Foundation advertised for an Executive Officer position. I got the job and was set to fully support what I suspected to be one big last chance for the Biosphere reserve concept in Noosa.
An important part of my job was to support the chair in keeping the organisation on the ‘straight and narrow’, making sure it was compliant with external regulations and the Foundation’s own policies.
Accountability and transparency were crucial since the Foundation was to disburse public funds from the ratepayers’ environment levy. Rather than working on developing a management plan and coordinated strategy, the Foundation hurriedly developed a grant scheme calling for ‘Big Ideas’. I say ‘hurriedly’ because no common vision or strategic plan was developed to support grant giving decisions.
The pressure was tangible and political. It was argued this grant scheme needed to be prioritised to re-build community trust after what some people felt was a ruthless disbandment of NBL. Much time, money and many initiatives had been wasted rather than built upon.
Unfortunately, my work at the Foundation was undermined and made impossible. The Noosa Council’s representative on the board of directors was the then mayor, Noel Playford, an honorary lifetime member of the NPA which had submitted a very large project proposal to the grant scheme.
It came as no surprise that this group’s proposal gained by far the greatest amount of funding which, in addition, was guaranteed for three years. As part of my role and responsibilities, I had to raise the conflict of interest issue. Consequently the mayor bullied and harassed me.
I had a breakdown and went on stress leave in January 2016. My WorkCover claim was accepted and it was acknowledged that a workplace injury through bullying by the mayor had occurred.
When the mayor retired at the March 2016 council elections, I tried to return to work. The Foundation board had in the meantime been replenished but the board was moving to be populated by associates of the former mayor and his colleagues.
It was not in a position to address the root causes that had allowed such a bad situation to develop. Unsurprisingly my return to work failed. I was on unpaid sick leave until the board decided to make my Executive Officer position redundant at the end of 2016.
Painful learning
This was a destructive and painful experience, but it taught me a lot. It taught me the importance of good planning and a meaningful policy framework. It taught me how a few individuals can derail many good and well-intentioned people and how important it is to courageously deal with these kinds of issues early and head on. It also confirmed the importance of fostering a positive organisational culture with an emphasis on trust, respect and building social capital.
Although I am deeply saddened and disappointed by what has occurred I sincerely hope the Foundation can undergo a robust evaluation process, learn from past mistakes and make the cultural and constitutional adjustments to bring tangible social and environmental benefits to our community.
To Noosa with Gratitude
Despite everything, I feel I have escaped becoming one of Noosa’s notorious ‘roadkills’ and I want to thank friends, family and some generous individuals of this community who supported my fight for fairness – from witness statements to human resource advice, from meeting support to offering shoulders to cry on when things got really bad.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I am also grateful for all the wonderful people I have had the opportunity and honour to collaborate with over the last 10 years – the maintainers and caretakers, the scientists, community leaders, consultants, creatives, conservationists and politicians.
We have some great projects lined up and I am excited about the future.
