The catchment care principle: a practical approach to achieving equity, ecosystem integrity and sustainable resource use

Steve Hatfield Dodds

CSIRO, Australia
PO Box 284, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia.
Steve.HatfieldDodds@csiro.au;

(Draft submitted 15 January 2004, 3950 words plus abstract, figures and references)

The author contributed has contributed to each of the Wentworth Group reports (2002, 2003a, 2003b), and was closely associated with the development of the catchment care principle. For background on the Wentworth Group see Pyper (2003) and Wentworth Group (2002).

Abstract

Achieving a working consensus on the ‘environmental duty of care’ of land managers is a key part of mobilizing the community support and public resources required to address major resource management challenges in Australia and elsewhere. Existing analytical approaches to this issue have not been able to resolve a stand-off between those emphasizing a ‘beneficiary pays’ approach in which land owners are paid to undertake desired management actions and those preferring a ‘polluter pays’ or ‘impacter pays’ approach. This paper outlines ‘the catchment care principle’ advocated by the Wentworth Group (2003a), which states ‘that individual resource managers have an obligation to avoid land or natural resource management practices that harm the long term interests of resource users as a whole’, and is interpreted as implying that resource mangement practices should not damage ecosystem integrity or essential landscape functions, while accepting that significant ecosystem modification and some damage to environmental values might be consistent with maintaining a healthy working landscape.

The paper argues that this principle offers a fresh and tractable approach to determining who should bear the costs of achieving sustainable resource use and biodiversity conservation. The catchment care principle differs from other approaches in a number of important ways, including that it explicitly seeks to integrate social and ecological perspectives, and that it takes account of the incidence of environmental benefits across different groups. This results in the catchment care principle having a number of advantages over alternative approaches in responding to the policy requirements and political economy of natural resource management reform.

Introduction

Achieving a working consensus on the ‘environmental duty of care’ of land managers is a key part of mobilizing the community support and public resources required to address major resource management challenges in Australia and elsewhere. Policy discussion of this issue has generally focused on economics, law and regulatory theory, and has given relatively little attention to underlying ecological issues or environmental justice perspectives. This socially oriented approach has clarified a number of important issues, but has not been able to resolve a stand-off between those emphasizing a ‘beneficiary pays’ approach in which land owners are paid to undertake desired management actions or deliver ecosystem service and those preferring a ‘polluter pays’ or ‘impacter pays’ approach in which land owners would bear at least a significant portion of costs of achieving politically determined management standards (see HRSCEH 2001, Aretino et al 2001).

This paper outlines an alternative approach, the ‘catchment care principle’, first advocated by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists2 as part of a comprehensive new model for regulating land clearing and native vegetation management (WG 2003a), which has been recently adopted by the NSW State Government (DPINR 2003). This approach differs in two important ways from the positions outlined above. First, its social analysis identifies an intermediate class of agents, land owners as a group, who may benefit from a particular action, whereas the other approaches tend to be framed in terms of ‘on farm benefits’ which accrue to the individual land owners undertaking the action and ‘off farm benefits’ that are assumed to accrue to the general community. Second, within this framework it gives explicit attention to the environmental incidence of maintaining landscape function, arguing that actions that are required to maintain landscape function provide significant benefits to landholders as a whole, and thus that it is fair for landholders as a whole to bear the cost of these actions. The policy stance advocated in the subsequent report of the Wentworth Group (2003b), dealing with water use and river health, is consistent with the catchment care principle (although the principle is not mentioned explicitly) and elaborates on who should bear the cost of repairing environmental damage caused by past actions and mistakes.

The remainder f the paper is arranged in five sections. Section Two summarizes the logic and context of the beneficiary pays, polluter pays, and impacter pays principles, giving particular attention to the interaction of these with different incidence and political economy of industrial pollution and natural resource management issues. Section Three outlines the current state of play and the factors that have contributed a policy gridlock on these issues. Section Four introduces the catchment care principle and highlights a number of ways that it differs from established policy principles. Section Five focuses on transition issues and structural adjustment, and argues that the catchment care principle does not apply to repairing past environmental damage or mistakes. The paper concludes in Section Six by arguing that the catchment care principle and the work of the Wentworth Group illustrate the strength and potential of the integrated approach called for by ecological economics, bringing together the best available social, economic, and ecological analysis to illuminate policy options that promote sustainable development.

Established equity principles in environmental policy

This section lays the groundwork for the description of the catchment care principle by outlining the meaning and implications of three established equity principles and alternative uses of the notion of an environmental duty of care. Each of these encapsulates a distinctive view on who should bear the cost of either causing environmental damage or achieving desired environmental goals (with a caveat on the use of the term ‘duty of care’ in this context).

The ‘polluter pays principle’

The ‘polluter pays principle’ was formulated by the OECD in the early 1970’s in the context of widespread moves to improve urban air quality by controlling point source emissions, and states that polluters should bear the cost of moving to and maintaining environmental standards, including the adoption of newly mandated pollution reducing measures (OECD 1972, 1991).

The principle is explicitly normative, stating an ethical position on who ought to bear the costs of pollution control. In policy terms it relates to a specific form of sovereign risk (the risk to business profitability arising from government changing the existing regulatory regime). The principle has no particular legal standing, however, and so is subordinate to normal constitutional requirements for compensation in relation to the acquisition of property, including the resumption of enforceable property rights.

It is important to note four things the OECD polluter pays principle does not do. It does not address the wider efficiency question of what level of pollution or pollution control is desirable (Nicolaisen and Hoeller 1990). It is silent on who should bear the costs of allowable pollution (as distinct from the cost of complying with environmental regulations). It does not imply that governments should not pay for actions which provide environmental benefits and are not mandatory, referred to in this paper as voluntary actions. Finally, the principle only applies to the direct or ‘legal’ incidence of complying with environmental regulation, and does not apply to the indirect or ‘economic’ incidence of these regulations. Thus the principle implies that governments should not subsidize the cost of adopting new pollution control technologies or undertaking mandatory biodiversity conservation measures, but is open to producers passing these costs through to consumers through higher prices (or back to employees and shareholders through lower wages or dividends). Indeed, it would usually be considered efficient and desirable for the ultimate beneficiaries of a polluting activity to bear at least a reasonable share of the costs of meeting environmental standards.

The ‘impacter pays’ and ‘extended polluter pays’ principles

The ‘impacter pays’ or ‘extended polluter pays’ principle goes beyond the OECD formulation to state that polluters should bear the costs imposed by allowable pollution, such as through making some payment to those impacted, as well as bearing the costs of complying with environmental regulations (Turner et al 1994). Australia, for example, imposes a Jet Aircraft Noise Levy on landings at Kingsford Smith Airport in Sydney, which is used to fund local noise amelioration works (Australia 1995:4.17, Hatfield Dodds 2002). These aircraft are already fully compliant with environmental regulations, including those relating to noise, and so the levy represents an additional burden related to allowable noise pollution.

The impacter pays approach is sometimes associated with arguments that presume that all pollution or environmental damage is ‘bad’, and tends to overlook situations where natural processes are able to accommodate certain types or levels of human disturbance.3

In practice, this approach can be difficult to apply to environmental issues where there is no clear line between ‘avoiding a bad’ (where the burden should be borne by the polluter) and ‘providing a good’ (where the beneficiary pays approach is generally expected). A related issue is that the lack of reference to socially or legally recognized environmental standards also removes the distinction between minimum or mandatory requirements and higher environmental targets that might be widely desired but not considered appropriate or legitimate to impose on all agents.

A final distinction between the polluter and impacter pays principles is that the introduction of a measure based on the impacter pays approach will normally impact on de facto property rights, by creating a legal obligation to pay (such as in the case of the noise levy) or an enforceable right to compensation among those adversely effected by the pollution (see Aretino et al 2001:19). This may be contrasted with a policy change under the OECD polluter pays principle, which in many cases would reduce an implicit or explicit permission or ‘licence’ to pollute without impacting on enforceable property rights (see Bromley 1991).

The ‘beneficiary pays’ principle

The ‘beneficiary pays’ principle states that those who benefit from an action should contribute to the cost of that action (including the opportunity cost of not undertaking allowable actions, such as the forgone income associated with not clearing land for agricultural use).

In the natural resource management context this effectively takes the existing set of land use practices and institutions as having some enduring legitimacy. This gives rise to two main implications. First, any change or increase in community preferences for environmental quality or biodiversity conservation should be satisfied by using public funds to pay for voluntary actions that provide benefits to the general community (noting that the general community would be subject to mandatory taxation to fund the incentive payments for voluntary actions by land managers, and that the burden on individual tax payers would not be in proportion to the perceived level or value of benefit they receive).4 Second, if changes in mandatory environmental standards are required then they should be accompanied by effective compensation for those who are adversely impacted by the changes, even if this is not required in law. In practice this position holds that transitional assistance should generally cover the ‘uncompensated costs’ imposed by changes in resource management standards, defined as the out-of-pocket and opportunity costs of complying with new standards, less the on-farm benefits of these (recognizing that many natural resource management practices provide some benefits but impose net costs at the farm level).

The first of these interpretations does not offend the OECD polluter pays principle, whereas the second is directly contrary to both the OECD principle and the extended polluter pays principle.

Environmental ‘duty of care’

The notion of establishing a ‘duty of care’ owed by land owners to the environment is invoked to mean a variety of things in Australian environmental policy debates.

First, duty of care is discussed as a particular form of legal responsibility arising under both common law and legislation. When embodied in legislation, duty of care is a specific policy mechanism that may be used to seek implicit or explicit environmental goals (see Industry Commission 1998, Bates 2001). Second, duty of care is frequently used as a synonym for mandatory environmental standards, referring to the level or nature of the minimum environmental management practices or outcomes that ought to be expected of land owners, regardless of the specific legal mechanism or institutional form used to specify and enforce these (see Young et at 2003). These first two uses are sometimes associated with a more general land ethic or commitment to resource stewardship (see Kneese and Schultze 1985, WPSQ n.d.). Third, duty of care is occasionally used to refer to a threshold level of cost or burden that ought to be borne by landholders as ‘their fair share’ of the transition to new environmental regulations, but above which they ought to receive assistance.

3 Pearce and Turner’s (1990) approach of defining pollution as waste disposal that exceeds assimilative capacity provides a potential resolution of these issues.

4 The lack of nexus between benefit and payment is a key difference between beneficiary pays taxes and user fees, with taxes being used as a proxy through which an identifiable constituency may contribute to the cost of providing a nonexcludable good or service, if an appropriate tax base can be identified (Treasury 1996).

This paper uses duty of care in the second of these senses.

A wicked stand-off on who should pay

After several years and countless reports and inquiries, Australia’s natural resource management policy dialogue has converged on a stable but unsatisfactory equilibrium, which may be described as a ‘wicked problem’ in the sense that its resolution appears to be beyond the scope of existing institutions (Rittel and Webber, 1973, Lindblom 1959, 1979). The federal and state Governments have repeatedly identified conservation of biodiversity on private land as an urgent priority, and are committed to addressing resource degradation and reversing the loss of native vegetation. These expressed intentions have not been realised, however, due to a three way stand off on who should bear the costs of achieving these goals.

All the participants in this stand-off share two assumptions: first, that the general community preferences (or expectations) for environmental quality will rise over time, and second, that ongoing payments to support the achievement of mandatory standards are either inappropriate or politically unachievable. These assumptions imply that the level of mandatory standards is the primary determinant of costs that land owners will be required to bear in achieving community environmental preferences.

Conflicting perspectives on how to achieve environmental objectives

Given these shared assumptions, three broad approaches to natural resource management policy have emerged. Each of these represents a potential alliance between two of the three interest groups (focused on environmental protection, farming interests, and fiscal restraint), which is blocked by the third group. The first approach, represented by Figure 1(a), calls for a significant increase in mandatory standards, complemented by payments for voluntary action over some transition period. This approach would achieve high levels of environmental protection (assuming that non-compliance does not undermine the environmental outcomes sought). The cost to government would be relatively modest, as land owners would bear the bulk of the burden. Implementation of this approach is blocked by a combination of economic and institutional factors that give farming interests political influence that is significantly greater than their relative demographic or economic size, effectively preventing a majority rule approach in which urban preferences are imposed on rural landholders.

The second approach, shown in Figure 1(b), seeks to achieve environmental goals through government incentives and voluntary action rather than increased mandatory standards. This might be described as a chequebook reform approach in which farming and (urban) green preferences are satisfied simultaneously though the injection of government funds. Implementing this approach is blocked by fiscal constraints, or perceptions of poor public ‘value for money’ amoung central economic agencies and key politicians. The approach also assumes that a sufficient number of landholders would offer to undertake the desired actions, within the funds available.

The third approach, shown in Figure 1(c), represents a minimum change scenario which falls short of desired levels of environmental quality, but apparently involves modest fiscal outlays and low costs for land owners. This is the staus quo: the default result of the stand-off over how to achieve resource management reform. Importantly, this approach assumes that ‘doing nothing’ is sustainable, and that current practices do not involve costs on land owners or future calls on government funds.

(a) Partial polluter pays approach, favouring environment and fiscal ‘interests’

(b) Beneficiary pays approach, favouring environment and resource production ‘interests’

(c) Minimal change, favouring short term resource production and fiscal ‘interests’

Figure 1: Contrasting perspectives on who should pay

Source: 1(a) draws on Young et al 2003, Hatfield Dodds 2003b

Contrasting the political economy of rural land use and urban air quality policies

It is interesting to contrast the current NRM policy gridlock (shown in Figure 1(c)) with the much more tractable political economy of urban air quality, which originally gave rise to the polluter pays principle and is frequently cited as an example of how consumer (or citizen) preferences can drive improvements in environmental quality. The underlying political economy of urban air quality is relatively simple, in part because the costs and benefits of the change are coincident, the causes of poor environmental quality are well understood, and the benefits of collective action are immediate and highly visible (see Arrow et al 1995). Additional factors supporting the adoption of the polluter pays approach included that the impact on industry of the change in the air quality standards was small in relation to total asset values, and that there were few constraints on industry passing through these costs in higher prices (with producers in other major jurisdictions also facing rising air quality requirements).5 Finally, under the air quality changes ‘like firms’ faced ‘like impacts’.

In contrast to this, the impacts of natural resource management are often distant in time and space (allowing costs to be shifted to others), resource degradation processes are generally poorly understood, and the benefits of improved management practices may take a number of decades to manifest (Williams 2001). These factors undermine the institutional mechanisms that underpin collective responses to environmental problems (Arrow et al 1995, see Brennan and Hamlin 2000). Furthermore, benefits generally occur off-farm and are often described as ‘public benefits’, contributing to a perception that urban people would be the primary beneficiaries of policy change, while rural people would bear the bulk of the costs, particularly in relation to biodiversity conservation (see HOCSCEH 2001). In addition, the out of pocket and opportunity costs of higher environmental standards are likely to be material for at least some farm enterprises, the majority of whom service export markets and would not be able to maintain their profitability through higher prices. Finally, changes in natural resource management standards would impact very differently on identical farm enterprises located in different parts of a catchment, or different parts of the country, or with a different type or amount or distribution of native vegetation on their property. These issues raise complex equity and efficiency issues which complicate the design of socially acceptable policy interventions.

5 These general observations are supported by the literature analyzing the notion of pollution havens, which generally suggests that lower industrial pollution standards provide little or no role in attracting investment, although lower income levels are associated with higher per capita pollution levels (Zarsky 1999).

The catchment care principle and approach

The catchment care principle seeks to resolve this stand-off on who should pay by focusing on the shared interest of the users of renewable natural resources in the maintenance of ecosystem integrity.

The catchment care principle is that individual resource users have an obligation to avoid land or natural resource management practices that harm the long term interests of resource users as a whole. This implies resource management practices should not damage ecosystem integrity or landscape function.6

Although the principle is framed as in terms of ‘no net harm’ (akin to the net social benefit test underlying cost benefit analysis), the principle is interpreted by the authors as implying a requirement to maintain fully functional landscapes (Wentworth Group 2003a:7, Hatfield Dodds 2003b). This greatly simplifies the implementation of the catchment care approach, and has the effect of linking resource management obligations to biophysical science and outcomes, rather than to social values.

This approach draws on aspects of the established equity principles, but differs from them in three important ways.

First, the uncompensated costs (or ‘duty of care’ contribution) that should be borne by farmers are determined by ecosystem integrity requirements, as ascertained by the best available science, rather than being established by community sentiment. As well as improving investment security, as discussed below, this allows a more nuanced approach to who should bear the economic cost of mandatory standards. The Wentworth Group comments, for example, that existing biodiversity conservation standards are important for maintaining healthy catchments but are “above the level that provides a net (economic) benefit to the rural community” and so “the broader community should pay farmers for the costs of providing this service on our behalf” (WG 2003a:8).

Second, the principle expands the discussion of incidence by identifying an intermediate group that sits between individual farmers and the general community, that of farmers or resource managers as a whole (see Figure 2). This contrasts with the usual interpretation of the beneficiary pays principle, which implicitly assumes that all off farm benefits accrue to the general community and so should be borne or funded by government on behalf of taxpayers. The catchment care approach highlights that a substantial portion of ‘off farm’ impacts (both positive and negative) occur on other farms, and that farmers will gain from the improved resource management practices of other farmers.

Figure 2: Classifying the potential incidence of benefits from resource management policies

Source: Hatfield Dodds (2003b)

Third, the principle is explicitly integrated, bringing together social and ecological principles, whereas the existing equity principles are only informed by social theory (and could be applied to a wide range of nonenvironmental issues, such as health policy or the introduction of occupational health and safety regulations).

6 “The catchment care principle is that landholders have a responsibility not to clear native vegetation where, on the best available science, this is contrary to the long term interests of rural industries” (WG 2003a:7)

The Wentworth Group (2003a:7) highlights how linking responsibilities to ecosystem integrity enhances

security for farmers:

“The catchment care principle focuses on maintaining fully functioning and productive landscapes. This approach improves investment security for landholders because it separates their personal responsibilities from changes in community attitudes. It also improves investment security for the farming community by preventing one farmer’s actions undermining the overall value of the natural resource base.”

A major advantage of the catchment care approach is that it helps to reframe the traditional conflict between those favouring ‘conservation values’ and those favouring ‘production values’ by focusing on the shared interest of both groups in maintaining ecosystem integrity. This implicitly suggests that the key tension is between short term and long term production values, rather than between conservation and development. It also offers the potential for win-win regulatory outcomes, protecting both conservation and development values, while satisfying fiscal requirements. The principle thus connects strongly back into the sustainable development literature (WCED 1987, Brookfield 1988, Pearce and Warford 1993), and its emphasis on the long term synergies between environmental protection and sustainable livelihoods (rather than a trade off between environment and development).

In this sense, the catchment care principle flows naturally from the Wentworth Group’s original call for Australians “to learn to live in harmony with our landscape, not fight against it” (WG 2002:3). The same logic and emphasis on “achieving security for both the environment and consumptive users” underlies the National Farmers Federation and Australian Conservation joint statement on water policy (NFF and ACF 2003:1).

Treatment of transitional assistance and environmental repair

The catchment care principle is framed in terms of avoiding actions that impose future damage and costs, and does not provide clear guidance on who should bear the cost of repairing past mistakes.

In addressing land clearing the Wentworth Group (2003a) proposed a regulatory mechanism that would protect previously cleared regrowth vegetation where this is needed to maintain catchment health – an example of repairing a past mistake – and argued that land owners should not bear the entire burden of this repair (proposing transitional assistance to prevent severe hardship, and to cover the loss of income for farmers required to maintain vegetation levels above the average for their catchment).

Repairing the mistakes of the past is a larger and more difficult issue in water reform, where governments have given out unsustainable levels of water allocations in many of Australia’s river and groundwater systems. In this context the Wentworth Group proposed that public funding should be provided to secure environmental flows, improve river management, and ensure nobody is unfairly treated in achieving water reforms. The Group avoided a chequebook reform approach, however, arguing that policies should avoid “windfall gains to existing entitlement holders who are not genuine water users” and that “all water users who benefit from reform (should) make a contribution to river health” (WG 2003b:16).

This suggests that the catchment care principle should be interpreted as providing a long term benchmark or reference point for environmental policy, and is consistent with providing public assistance in the transition to new more sustainable resource management practices.

Figure 3 illustrates the proposed catchment care approach to cost sharing and transitional assistance.

Figure 3: Cost sharing and transitional assistance under the Catchment Care Principle

6. Conclusions

This paper has sought to provide a political economy perspective on the real world application of different policy principles, particularly the polluter pays and the beneficiary pays approaches, in order to explain how the tension between these principles has contributed to NRM policy stand off in Australia. In particular, the paper has argued that:

(i) differences in the incidence of costs and benefits offer a plausible explanation of the successful application of the polluter pays principle to urban air quality issues, and the reluctance to apply a strict polluter pays approach to resource management issues; and

(ii) the practical application of the beneficiary pays principle has been hampered by its failure to identify and consider the incidence of potential reforms on land holders as a group (inflating the burden to be borne by taxpayers).

In this context, this paper has argued that the catchment care principle:

(iii) offers a fresh and distinctive approach to determining who should bear the cost of achieving sustainable resource use and biodiversity conservation, drawing on established policy principles;

(iv) differs from other principles in its attention to integrating social and ecological insights, particularly in relation to the incidence of environmental impacts across different groups; and

(v) provides a tractable basis for resolving some of Australia’s most challenging resource management issues by focusing stakeholders on their shared interest in maintaining landscape function;

(vi) represents a long term framework that does not preclude governments providing transitional assistance.

The principle has already generated considerable interest amoung Australian policy makers and other stakeholders, and been adopted as part of new NSW landscape conservation model (see DPINR 2003, ACG 2003, Hatfield Dodds 2003c).

A final conclusion is that the catchment care principle (and the work of Wentworth Group more generally) illustrate the strength and potential of ecological economics to identify new and effective policy options for promoting sustainable development through the integration of the best available social, economic, and ecological analysis.

References

ACG (The Allen Consulting Group), 2003, Nature and Extent of Environmental Risks to the State Budget: Salinity Degradation and Biodiversity Loss. Report to the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance, Executive Summary, July 2003.

Aretino, B., P. Holland, A. Matysek, and D. Peterson, 2001, Cost Sharing for Biodiversity Conservation: A Conceptual Framework. Productivity Commission Staff Research Paper, AusInfo, Canberra.

Arrow, K., B. Bolin, R. Costanza, P. Dasgupta, C. Folke, C.S. Holling, B-O Jansson, S. Levin, K-G. Mäler, C. Perrings, D. Pimental, 1995, ‘Economic Growth, carrying capacity, and the environment’, Science 268:520-521, reprinted in Ecological Economics 15 (1995) 91-95.

Australia, Commonwealth of, 1995, Budget Statements 1995-96. Budget Paper No.1. AGPS, Canberra.

Bates, G., 2001, A Duty of Care for the Protection of Biodiversity on Land. Consultancy Report to the Productivity Commission, AusInfo, Canberra.

Brennan, G., and P. Hamlin, 2000, Democratic Devices and Desires. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Bromley, D.W., 1991, Environment and economy: Property rights and pubic policy. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Brookfield, H.C., 1988, ‘Sustainable development and the environment’, Journal of Development Studies, 25(1) 126-135.

Buckingham Shum, S., 1997, Representing Hard-to-Formalise, Contextualised, Multidisciplinary, Organisational Knowledge. AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge Management (1997) Stanford University, AAAI Press. (http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/sbs/org-knowledge/aikm97/sbspaper2.html

COAG (Council of Australian Governments), August 2003, Communiqué. Department of Prime Minster and Cabinet, Canberra. (http://www.ministers.dotars.gov.au/ja/releases/2003/august/a100_2003_attach.htme)

DPINR (Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources), October 2003, Natural Resource Management Reform. DPINR, Sydney. (http://www.dipnr.nsw.gov.au/nvrig/index.html#management) Hatfield Dodds, S., 2002, ‘Practical Issues in the Design of Environmental Taxes in Australia’ in L. Kreiser (ed), 2002, Critical Issues in International Environmental Taxation. CCH Incorporated, Chicago.

Hatfield Dodds, S., 2003a, Implementing the ‘catchment care’ principle. Presentation to the Government Environment and Heritage Committee, Canberra, March 2003.

Hatfield Dodds, S., 2003b, Beyond ‘duty of care’: A practical approach to achieving equity, ecosystem integrity and sustainable development. Presentation to Greening Australia Workshop on ‘Who should pay for the environment’, Brisbane, 8 September 2003.

Hatfield Dodds, S., 2003c, Nature and Extent of Environmental Risks to the State Budget: Salinity and Biodiversity Loss. Economic and Budgetary Risk of Environmental Degradation Forum, Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance, Melbourne, 10 September 2003.

HRSCEH (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and Heritage), 2001, Public Good Conservation: Our challenge for the 21st Century. Interim report of the inquiry into the effects upon landholders and farmers of public good conservation measures imposed by Australian governments, Parliament of Australia, Canberra.

Industry Commission, 1998, A Full Repairing Lease: Inquiry into Ecologically Sustainable Land Management. IC Inquiry Report No.60, AGPS, Canberra.

IUCN (The World Conservation Union) Biodiversity in Development Project, 2001, ‘Incentive measures for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity’, Biodiversity Brief #4 in Biodiversity Briefs, IUCN, DFID (UK Department for International Development) and the European Commission.

Kneese, AV. and W.D. Schultze, 1985. ‘Ethics and environmental economics’ in AV. Kneese and J.L. Sweeney (eds), 1985, Handbook of natural resource and energy economics: Volume 1, Elsvier, Amsterdam.

Lindblom, C.E., 1959, ‘The science of 'muddling through’, Public Administration Review 19:79-88.

Lindblom, C.E., 1979, ‘Still muddling through, not yet there’, Public Administration Review 39:517-526.

NFF and ACF (National Farmers Federation and Australian Conservation Foundation) with L. Boully, S. Hatfield Dodds, S. Morton, J. Williams, and M. Young,, 2003, Principles for a Long-Term Australian Water Policy Framework and Action Plan: Joint Statement to the Prime Minister, Premiers, and Australian Community. Sydney.

Nicolaisen, J. and P. Heoller, 1990, Economics and the Environment: A survey of issues and policy options. OECD Department of Economics and Statistics, Working Paper No.82, OECD, Paris.

OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), 1975, The Polluter Pays Principle - Definition, Analysis, Implementation. OECD, Paris.

OECD (Organsiation for Economic Cooperation and Development), 1991, Environmental Policy: How to Apply Economic Instruments. OECD, Paris.

Pearce, D.W. and J. Warford, 1993, World Without End: Economics, environment and sustainable development. Oxford University Press for the World Bank, New York.

Pearce, D.W., and R.K. Turner, 1990, Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment. Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York.

Pyper, W, 2003, ‘The Wentworth View: A blueprint for change’, Ecos 115:23-36 (April-June 2003).

Rittel, H.W.J., and M.M. Webber, 1973, ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’, Policy Sciences. 4:155-169.

Treasury, 1996, ‘Hypothecation’, Economic Round-up (Summer 1996), Department of the Treasury, Canberra.

Turner, R.K., D.W. Pearce and I. Bateman, 1994, Environmental Economics: An elementary introduction. Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York.

WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development), 1987, Our Common Future. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.

Wentworth Group, 2002, Blueprint for a living continent: A way forward from the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists. WWF, Sydney, November 2002. (www.wwf.org.au)

Wentworth Group, 2003a, A New Model for Landscape Conservation in NSW. Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists Report to Premier Carr. WWF, Sydney, February 2002. (www.wwf.org.au)

Wentworth Group, 2003b, Blueprint for a National Water Plan. WWF, Sydney, July 2003. (www.wwf.org.au)

Williams, J., 2001, ‘Farming without harming: Can we do it?’ Agricultural Science 14(1):20-24.

Young, M., T. Shi, and J. Crosthwaite, 2003, Duty of Care: An Instrument for Increasing the Effectiveness of Catchment Management. Department of Sustainability and Environment, Victoria.

Zarsky, L., 1999, Havens, Halos And Spaghetti: Untangling the Evidence About Foreign Direct Investment and the Environment. OECD Conference on Foreign Direct Investment and the Environment (Netherlands, 28-29 January 1999), OECD, Paris.