Sustainable governance for small desert settlements: Combining single settlement localism and multi-settlement regionalism
Deserts are, by their nature, sparsely populated areas. On one recent reckoning undertaken for the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre by Taylor, Brown and Bell, the Australian desert accounted for 45 per cent of the continental land mass but contained just one per cent of the population: i.e. about 180,000 people out of just over 18 million people Australia-wide at the time of the 2001 Census.1 About half these desert dwelling Australians lived in just five urban settlements with populations of over 10,000 people. Another quarter lived in 17 smaller urban settlements of between 1,000 and 3,500 people. And the last quarter lived in about 400 small desert settlements with average populations of just 100 or so (Taylor, Brown and Bell 2006: 38).