Collaboration in action: the Dairy Moving Forward response to drought

Abstract

Dairy Moving Forward (DMF) was an AUD$5 million programme launched in 2003 to support farmers with drought impacts on dairy businesses across the country. It was the first programme, coordinating at a national level, to align public and private sector service organisations in a joint dairy sector initiative. The objective of DMF was to provide all dairy farmers with a better understanding of their situation and take action from a more informed position regarding the implications of the drought for their business. The DMF programme provided an opportunity to research the emergence of collaboration as the vision statement was for 'an industry acting together through powerful collaborative leadership'. An emphasis was placed on collaboration over competition, building capacity of people and organisations, and goal attainment. It relied on regional and professional networks as necessary components of sector development. This paper provides an analysis of the ways organisations participated in DMF, constructing joint work areas and performing a shared delivery of tasks. Data for this study was gathered from three rounds of semi structured interviews with key DMF participants. Interviews focused on the key evaluative outcome areas while retaining sufficient flexibility to explore issues with respondents where appropriate. Additional data was gathered from participant observations of significant Dairy Moving Forward meetings. Data was captured using audio recordings and field notes that were later transcribed and thematically analysed using the software package, N-Vivo. Results indicate that historical considerations were an important factor in collaboration, with many respondents referring to collaboration as a distinctive cultural attribute of the dairy industry, relative to other industries. The provision of cash by a lead organisation acted as a catalyst to organisations to engage with DMF. Partner organisations needed to bring resources to the table too, to complement cash contributions. All partners shared a sense that the industry was in a crisis of such magnitude that it would take a joint response to manage our way through the drought.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.