Healthy Country Planning and how it can support Indigenous Protected Area consultation projects

Healthy Country Planning (HCP) is an approach that helps IP & LC bring together cultural knowledge, community priorities and ecological information in a structured way to guide the management of land and sea-country. Adapted from the Conservation Standards for the Practice of Conservation, the framework supports participatory planning processes that are both culturally grounded and practically focused.

In Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) consultation projects, HCP provides a clear pathway for translating community aspirations into agreed conservation priorities and implementable management strategies. Through facilitated workshops and structured planning tools, Traditional Owners, ranger teams and partner organisations can work collaboratively to identify conservation targets, understand key threats and develop coordinated actions.

Importantly, the approach also strengthens monitoring and evaluation processes. By linking planning decisions to indicators and adaptive management cycles, IPA programs are better positioned to demonstrate outcomes, learn from experience and adjust management over time. This supports accountability to communities as well as alignment with government program requirements.

Healthy Country Planning plays a valuable role not only in developing IPA management plans, but also in building long-term organisational capability. When applied effectively, it helps create shared ownership of conservation decisions and supports Indigenous leadership in caring for Country in ways that are culturally meaningful and operationally effective.

Healthy Country Planning Framework

Exciting new funding opportunity for Indigenous Protected Areas

A new funding round has just opened to support Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) consultation projects across Australia.

Released through the Australian Bushland Program, this grant opportunity is designed to support Traditional Owners to explore whether declaring an IPA on their Country is the right pathway for them. The funding strategically targets currently under-represented areas of the National Reserve System, with a strong focus on biodiversity and ecosystem conservation priorities.

Up to $13 million is available nationally to support a minimum of eight new IPA consultation projects over a two-year period (2026–2028). Successful projects will be supported to undertake community-led consultation, planning, governance development and the preparation of IPA management and MERI frameworks, enabling informed decision-making by Traditional Owners.

Importantly, this funding supports Indigenous groups to determine, by 2028, whether they wish to formally dedicate an IPA on their Country — recognising that this is a voluntary, culturally led decision-making process.

If you are working with, or are part of, an Indigenous organisation interested in exploring an IPA, this is a significant opportunity worth close consideration.

If you’d like to discuss what this opportunity could look like in practice — or how to prepare for an IPA consultation process — feel free to get in touch.

MERI Frameworks help Indigenous Protected Areas and Indigenous Ranger Programs tell their story

MERI frameworks are crucial to adaptive management, identifying critical indicators describing how we evaluate and improve management. The development of MERI plans is straightforward when the underlying adaptive management framework has a structure that links inputs with outputs and outcomes.

A good MERI framework helps projects to better tell their story by explaining the Theory of Change of proposed conservation interventions. They ultimately create confidence in a project’s ability to achieve the outcomes it proposes – important both for a project’s ability to access funding and comply with funding requirements.

This FLYER outlines how the clear and transparent structure of Healthy Country Planning allows projects to develop robust MERI frameworks that help us respond to three crucial questions:

·        Are we following our plan? Are we implementing the actions and strategies for our work plan?

·        Are the things we are doing leading to the expected results -  are we achieving the intended outcomes?

Mid-Term and Full Cycyle Review of Indigenous Protected Area Management Plans

Addressing complex systems like the environment, community and culture, plans of managements for Indigenous Protected Areas need to be adaptive - and as such reviewed from time to time to ensure that the plan is still appropriate for the context.

This PDF resource (DOWNLOAD HERE) shows how the tools of the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation / Healthy Country Planning can help Indigenous Protected Area projects through the process of monitoring, evaluation, reporting and improvement (MERI).