‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

Have these bioregional processes been adopted by government planning?
Yes. Auditing and planning at a bioregional 
scale
is perhaps the main influence of bioregionalism 
upon mainstream planning. The idea of engagement, planning and decision-making at the regional 
level requires information to be collected and analysed on a regional basis. Previously, data was 
collected according to political jurisdictions, business needs or convenience (eg postcodes), not in 
relation to bioregions. Further, there was little data on biodiversity. Drawing upon the enormous 
advances in technologies for mapping regions, such as GIS, geographic mapping was undertaken to 
begin to fill this gap, mostly in relation to specific issues like biodiversity conservation.
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Inventories 
of regional resources and land uses were subsequently conducted (including the continental shelf).
Thus far, however, land has not been inventoried for the potential 
alternative
resources of, say, a new 

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Bioregional Planning 
carbohydrate or solar economy (eg biomass fuels or biobased materials for construction).
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Rather, 
inventories of resources have been dominated by the search for standard industrial processes that can 
be attracted to a region. Even catchment management authorities in Australia have been accused of 
favouring entrenched development interests, rather than changing the nature of development to make 
it more ecological. Decision-making at the regional scale will not, by itself, change the dominant 
paradigm of development. Nor will it change the nature of pluralist politics with its short-term 
horizons.
Wouldn’t the change to regional planning influence paradigms and politics?
Despite the creation of catchment-level planning authorities, the zero sum nature of traditional politics 
– picking winners and losers – does not necessarily change. Participation still happens largely through 
interest group struggle rather than, say, community engagement through collective design processes.
The idea of larger-scale bioregional boundaries has been taken on board, however. Since natural 
regions and social decision-making jurisdictions are meant to be ‘aligned’ in bioregional planning, 
it is increasingly considered 
de rigour
to define regions by natural boundaries. This may explain a 
preoccupation with defining regional boundaries. There has been a prolonged and distracting debate 
in the bioregional literature over how to determine the boundaries of regions.
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Unfortunately, such 
a debate can tend to emphasize ‘form over function’. It is generally held that the determination of 
bioregional boundaries should be guided primarily by ‘edges’ between natural regions with different 
vegetation, climates or topography. A variety of criteria for determining edges have been suggested, 
such as:
•
The ‘biotic shift’ (ie the percentage change in species of flora and fauna from one region to 
another)
• 
Watersheds (ie catchments or groupings of catchment areas)
• 
Cultural patterns, as indigenous people have retained knowledge and practices that evolved 
with their bioregion
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Of course, the focus on edges and regional boundaries is in conflict with the understanding that 
bioregions and ecosystems, as well as cultural systems, overlap.
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