The presentation will detail practical lessons in policy and advocacy from the environmental NGO sector perspective on the inception of SA's Biodiversity Bill, its legislative development, political negotiations, and ultimate passage through Parliament with a range of amendments.

Lessons from this South Australian experience will then be extracted and applied to a broader environmental law reform context, specifically, Australian interstate and Federal environmental law reform.

Restoration at scale is essential to reversing land degradation. Restoration can improve biodiversity outcomes, ecosystem function, and enhance people’s relationships with land and each other. It can even improve agroecological productivity. Yet contending values, siloed agencies, and various forms of incumbency continue to stall progress. In this paper we explore lessons from landscape-scale restoration endeavours led by NGOs in various collaborations. We mostly focus on Gondwana Link (WA) and the Great Eastern Ranges Initiative (east coast). Over the last 20 years, these and similar initiatives in southern Australia and New Zealand, have navigated significant, political, climatic and investment/market change. Some have grown in reach and impact despite shrinking public investment and jarring policy change. Our research draws lessons from such ‘bright spots’ (after Bennett et al., 2016) to unpack lessons for policy, writ-large. Our qualitative analysis of these bright spots suggests that policy innovation is a key (but often missing) driver. Local and regional policy innovation is more productive than larger scale, state and national policy innovation. Gondwana Link have used their significant convening and network governance capacity to build outcomes from emerging carbon and nature repair markets, by collaborating to support Indigenous-led restoration and land management, for example. Such nimble and generative innovation is rarely reflected at larger scales as a result of well-known barriers and constraints. In this paper, we explore options, from our analysis, to overcome these.

The RSPB is one of the world’s largest conservation NGO’s, with well over a million members and a large estate of nature reserves. It advocates policy in the constituent countries of the UK. These policy positions are supported by science, and it has an internal research department that answers questions of high priority for the organisation. Successful conservation depends on translating science into suitable action by policy and law makers and by land managers, and the RSPB focuses on applied science and works to see the results of this science turned into policy, legislation, and practice. There are many barriers to achieving the goals of effective policy and conservation, but there have been successes, and the RSPB’s model of conservation can offer some lessons. I spent twenty years working in the RSPB’s Centre for Conservation Science, beginning as a Research Assistant, ending up leading the RSPB’s science in Wales, before returning to Australia earlier this year. In this talk I will discuss my experiences working in the science department of a large NGO, and in linking science into policy and practice, both internally and externally.