Diversify, specialise, reform, or co-operate: analysis of the strategic responses from natural resource management organisations living under the shadow of austerity
Kirsop-Taylor, NA
Date: 6 September 2017
Conference paper
Publisher
European Consortium for Political Research
Abstract
Many European governments have instituted programmes of fiscal austerity in response to the
global financial crash of 2008. These austerity programmes have sought to cut public sector
spending, including to environmental management organisations which tend to be heavily
reliant on public funding. This curtailment of funding impacts ...
Many European governments have instituted programmes of fiscal austerity in response to the
global financial crash of 2008. These austerity programmes have sought to cut public sector
spending, including to environmental management organisations which tend to be heavily
reliant on public funding. This curtailment of funding impacts upon organization’s business
models, reduces their abilities to conduct environmental management activities, and drives
them towards new organizational responses and strategies. After seven years of austerity in
the UK, this paper engages environmental management organisations within the North Devon
UNESCO biosphere reserve partnership to seek to understand how they have been affected by,
and have organizationally responded to, the UK austerity agenda. Through eighteen semistructured interviews it was discovered that, whilst many of the assumed negative impacts of
austerity have been borne out, this period has also forced organisations to critically re-evaluate
their strategy and governance. The outcome of which is that organisations have tended to adopt
individual and mixed strategies of diversifying, restructuring, specialising, avoiding, ignoring
or co-operating in response to austerity. Each response or combination of responses brings its
own risks, rewards, and outcomes. Considering the breadth of existing international austerity
programmes, and the scope for further austerity in the wake of new global financial shocks,
this study points towards responses and strategies that organisations can adopt to survive, and
perhaps thrive in austere times.
Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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