Event
by Peter Cullen, CRC for Freshwater Ecology, University of Canberra
Introduction
Water is fundamental to our survival in this dry land. This is obvious and was recognised long ago in early legislation and in our investments in infrastructure to manage water. It is now recognised as unfortunate that we did not invest to understand the systems we were manipulating with such catastrophic effects, or the institutional arrangements, which continue to fail.
Historically we know that civilisations have risen and fallen on their ability to manage water in a sustainable way. Irrigation in particular has been a relatively short term feature in many societies (Postel, 1999). Water management has however been a complex issue, largely because of our failure to understand cause and effect relationships, because of their separation in space or time.
In Australia, we know we have low and unreliable rainfall over much of the country. Our urban societies are clustered around the better watered edges of our continent, but even our literature celebrates the variability of our rainfall. As children we were taught McKellar’s poem and recited "… of droughts and flooding rains". The importance of water was always apparent, but became a barrier to Federation when arguments over whether our rivers were best used as irrigation supply channels or navigable waterways led to a Royal Commission. Whatever way it was used, water was seen then as the key to wealth and prosperity in rural Australia. It is unfortunate that the greed and ignorance of Governments and individuals has allowed this wonderful asset to so degrade. Water is still seen as pivotal to our futures, and greed and ignorance continue to be the major drivers of the unwanted outcomes we are producing.
Legacies of the Past
Our Federal structure certainly provides a major handicap in natural resource management, and is especially damaging in situations where a river defines the boundary between different jurisdictions. The stupidity of having different management regimes on different banks of a river is obvious. When one jurisdiction "owns" the river, then the obligations of the adjacent jurisdiction are even less clear.
Our institutional arrangements were based on the misunderstanding that water and land could be managed separately, and this fallacy is still not recognised in some jurisdictions. Our failure to appreciate the impacts of land clearing and excessive use of water meant that extensive degradation resulted before people became aware of these linkages. People felt they had a right to cause as much degradation as their more ignorant forbearers. Claims by Queensland that the taxpayers should compensate farmers for not clearing land and causing a downstream nuisance are an interesting reversal of natural justice. One wonders who will be next to seek compensation for not vandalising a public asset.
One important legacy of the past is the ownership of water in waterways, and the ownership of the riparian zone being vested in the crown. While I argue the Crown has frequently mismanaged this resource, at least it remains largely a public asset. This is of course presently under threat as people seek to clarify property rights for water, and some seek rights in perpetuity rather than a licence to use for a specified period. It might be argued that people would have cared more for waterways if they were in private ownership as in some other countries, but in my view this would have made the upstream-downstream tensions even more difficult to manage. Issues of ownership continue with current debates on farm dams and how much run off an individual can capture before it reaches a defined watercourse.
Our past management of land and water has given us extensive degradation of rivers. Common symptoms are periodic toxic algal blooms and the loss of native fish and birds. Many of our streams have been swamped with sand due to upstream soil erosion. We have lost of many of our wetlands and have alienated floodplains from rivers. There is now wide scale salinisation of agricultural lands.
The problem is that we have in some places encouraged inappropriate land use, and in others we allow second rate land management that means agriculture has a huge downstream "footprint". Agricultural activity does not need to degrade thousands of kilometres of rivers and threaten water supplies to downstream communities. A national challenge is to reduce the footprint of agriculture, and where this is beyond us, to remove the agriculture that causes such damage.
There is no doubt this is a costly and difficult challenge. Our knowledge base is still patchy, we have limited ways of delivering the knowledge to those who make decisions and there are social costs that must be addressed.
Partnerships in Natural Resource Management
One response to this enormous challenge has been to develop the concept of Government-community partnerships. Partnerships recognise there is mutual benefit in acting together so that each partner benefits on ways they could not do by acting alone. Governments recognise they cannot change land management without the active participation of land managers. Land managers see technical and financial resources as a way to letting them better manage the resource.
Governments have developed the concept of "mutual obligations" in other contexts, and it seems an appropriate one to explore this concept in the context of natural resource management.
Obligations of Landholders
The landholders first responsibility is to not provide a nuisance to their neighbours. This is well-accepted in urban communities, and in aspects like weeds and feral pests in rural areas. The need to allow water to pass downstream for other uses, and to ensure that salt, nutrients, agricultural chemicals and sediment do not restrict the uses to which downstream water can be put is less well accepted.
It is less clear whether individual landholders have an obligation to protect and maintain biodiversity, although of course many landholders do see such stewardship of the land as a critical part of ownership. The duty of care of alandholder has been developed recently by the Industry Commission (1998)
Obligations of State Governments
The State Government must ensure that individual landholders do meet their obligations. They attempt this through extension, technical transfer and education programs of various types, including supporting community groups such as landcare. They may provide subsidies and incentives of various sorts, and they might use sanctions. It is interesting to note how slow Governments have been to apply pollution control sanctions to rural industries, despite their widespread and successful use with most other industries. Allowing rural industries to pollute is in reality another form of subsidy as some of the real costs of production are passed to those downstream, rather than the consumer of the agricultural product.
It is difficult to measure contaminants coming off land, so many of the normal pollution control tools have been difficult to apply in rural areas. One strategy has been to licence "best management practice", but in many cases the practices promoted have been far from "best" and have entrenched the inadequate land management.
State Governments also have the responsibility for allocating water. Initially this was between competing extractive uses. Tensions between urban and rural demands, and between upstream and downstream agricultural uses have been frequent. In the past decade there has been a growing recognition that the health of the waterways is damaged by excessive extraction, and that the environment itself has a need for water. Working out how much water and how it can be clawed back in over allocated systems has been the issue of the late nineties, and will continue through the present decade.
Obligations of the Federal Government
The Federal Government must ensure any International obligations that Australia has become a signatory to, are met. Also it has a responsibility when cross border issues emerge, although the two Governments concerned may handle these in a bilateral way.
The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act passed in 1999 provides for controls over actions of National environmental significance. This clearly refers to identified Ramsar wetlands and to nationally threatened plant and animal species and communities. It clearly provides a mechanism by which the Federal Government could move on excessive vegetation clearance and excessive extraction of water, especially when such activities threaten important wetlands and other communities.
The Federal Government also has an obligation to assist to resolve problems of national extent that are beyond the financial and political resources of States to take effective action. Salinity has already been recognised as such a problem because the task is huge and State Governments are often too close to stakeholders to be capable of making some of the hard decisions.
Governments also have an obligation to fund appropriate research so that land and water management becomes more sustainable. Current research effort is often fragmented and short term, increasing the likelihood that we will continue to make mistakes. There is little effective monitoring and evaluation of the effectiveness of land and water management. The delivery mechanism by which the knowledge we do have is transmitted to agency staff and landholders is fragmented and often ineffective.
Challenges for the Partnership Concept in Natural Resource Management
Denial
It is not possible to develop a partnership when one of the potential partners does not believe there is a problem. While landholders do not accept they have a salinity problem, or that they are causing a problem to their downstream neighbours, the effective partnerships to reduce the problem are not possible. While irrigators do not accept that excessive extraction of water or the quality of return flows are degrading the health of waterways then it is not possible to move forward in a partnership sense and solutions may have to be imposed. Research, education and possibly joint investigations are the way forward in such situations.
Public investment on private land
There have been concerns that it is inappropriate for public funds to be spent on private land where the landholder asset is effectively improved through public investment. In my view such investments may have significant public benefits downstream, and may be quite appropriate if the outcomes are sufficient and are actually delivered. In situations where the public investment leads to a significant capital appreciation for the landholder, some claw back mechanism may be appropriate when the property is transferred or when the landholder pays tax in a similar way to what is done with Higher Education cost recovery.
Cost Shifting
There is considerable concern at the federal level that whenever Federal funds are used for natural resource management the recipient State attempts to reduce State funding and transfer staff and other costs to the Federal program. There is certainly some evidence of this happening.
Beyond Local Interests
Many regional catchment plans have been developed using Natural Heritage Trust Funding. This has had a significant outcome in helping local communities understand the system they are living with, and attempting to prioritise activities. However few of the plans have embraced hard decisions like removing agriculture from unsuitable lands or the clawing back of over allocated water. Few of the Plans have included State and National interests, which have been poorly articulated to the community. The Plans have generally failed to effectively manage the upstream-downstream tension, especially across State borders.
Fragmented and Non-Strategic Funding
Despite the pressures on the community to prioritise their proposed actions in catchment plans, the actually granting of NHT funds can often be criticised for failing to address important strategic issues and failing to produce effective outcomes. The funds have certainly been widely distributed, thus empowering a wide community to the issues and motivating them to action. The ability to find matching funds has sometimes skewed natural resource investment.
Knowledge
There is much that we do not know about effective natural resource management, and ongoing research is critical. We need to ensure that we only fund excellent research. Much of what we need to know requires research at the landscape scale and over periods of a decade. Much of it also requires what is becoming known as "mode 2" research that uses teams of appropriate disciplinary experts to work together to solve a problem. Unfortunately much of the research presently funded does not meet these requirements and the organisational structures and funding models we use for research are inhibiting the development of more appropriate models.
We do however have a lot of the necessary knowledge, and there is no excuse for not applying what we do know. There are failures in the delivery of knowledge from the research community to agency staff and to landholders, and there is a structural weakness in that nobody takes real responsibility for the function. Much of it is done poorly, with little evaluation and accountability.
Prime Ministers Action Plan on Salinity and Water Quality
The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) comprising the Prime Ministers and the State Premiers agreed to an historic plan to combat salinity and water quality problems at their meeting on 3 November 2000.
The core of this Plan is based on community based catchment plans. These plans will be strengthened by providing better technical input for their development. This will be done partly through the existing facilitator network and partly through specialist salinity "hit teams" that will come into a region for a short time to help explain the technical information that is available. Support will also be provided through the use of air borne remote sensing to identify reservoirs and channels of salt movement underground (the so called "ultrasound" of the earth). There are also clear research needs to develop more appropriate farming systems and to understand the impacts of salinity on biota.
Plans will also need to address National and State interests, and it will be a challenge for the relevant jurisdictions to identify the interests early in the process. We are well advanced in some areas, with flow targets having been set for the Murray-Darling Basin and some progress with salinity and nutrient targets. While we have already a number of important wetlands identified, we do not seem to have realised that upstream water extraction can lead to the destruction of such areas. Moving from thinking about Ramar wetlands to thinking about Ramsar catchments will be a challenge for this process. This approach also needs to look at setting targets for maintaining native vegetation and for encouraging deep-rooted vegetation in appropriate parts of the catchment.
Once catchment plans are developed they will need to be submitted to a formal accreditation process. The details of this are still unclear, but presumably this will involve technical appraisal by State and Federal experts. Once accredited, the proposal is for block funding to be available to the community groups to implement the plans.
Funding may be available to purchase back water for the environment and may involve funds to retire land or change land use. It may include subsidies to encourage strategic tree planting. Hopefully these investments will be based on firm outcomes and clear timelines so that the desired outcomes are achieved for the taxpayer funds. Accountability and evaluation will have to be a part of this system.
In the first instance this program will be focussed on twenty nominated catchments that are seen as having serious degradation problems. This targeting has the unfortunate effect of rewarding those responsible for the most degradation. Other instruments are urgently needed to encourage sustainable management. This system does encourage people to assume degradation is acceptable since once it reaches a certain level, massive tax dollars will become available.
The Nature of Mutual Obligations in Natural Resource Management
It is clear that society expects rural landholders to minimise the externalities from soil, salt, nutrients and agricultural chemicals, and to ensure their activities do not unduly reduce the downstream flow of water. It is also clear that landholders have some obligations to maintain the soil asset and perhaps to preserve biodiversity. There is an emerging concept of "duty of care" over those who are custodians of the land that goes beyond simple externalities and downstream impacts. To assist in these functions, society provides a knowledge base through research and it provides funding in various ways to assist landholders. The community-government partnership requires communities to contribute knowledge, energy and their resources to achieving the desired outcomes. The community also carries the responsibility for integrating the various values and information from largely isolated professional disciplines. Governments contribute technical information and funds, both directly and through the tax systems, and may provide access to resources such as water.
There is an ongoing tension in the relationship between the need for accountability of public funds and for due process in decision making by empowering regional communities. Community groups become impatient with delays due to assessment process and what they see as undue red tape. They are concerned that excessive resources go into administration at the expense of on-ground delivery.
Failing Partnerships ?
The use of volunteer labour has a long tradition in Australia. One example is the rural fire fighting services which are largely based on volunteers. In recent years there has been a fall in participation in rural fire brigades which is seen as a response to increased bureaucracy and control, loss of independence and burdensome training requirements (Wiseman, 1998).
It is important to understand that community-government partnerships are partnerships where community groups volunteer their skills and labour to solve problems of mutual interest. Volunteers must not be seen as a cheap alternative to paid staff. This is not an opportunity to shift public costs to selected community volunteers. Community participation is critical because the tasks seem well beyond the capacity of Governments.
Individuals will withdraw from community involvement if they do not see the benefits of partnership. Part of the keys to successful engagement is the development of shared visions for the outcomes to be achieved. Developing this shared vision requires a dialogue between local interests with technical experts and those who can bring a wider vision of State and National objectives. We need to have effective two way
communication — dialogue between interests rather than just telling others what they want. Some technical material will have to be presented in non-technical language. The Landcare and Catchment facilitators already funded by Government have been critical agents of change by empowering community groups to find out and make better decisions.
There is at present much discussion about capacity building in rural communities and there are some excellent leadership programs. It is important that we develop this area in ways that empower the community rather than simply train a work force. We need to be careful to ensure that growing credentialism does not inhibit community involvement.
The Future
It would seem that land and water management is now firmly on the political agenda, and Governments of all persuasions accept that the pressing national problems of natural resource management need funding and other support.
It is important that we learn from the Natural Heritage Trust and build on its achievements. We need to continue to help communities analyse their problems and understand the various approaches to combating them. But the critical need, now recognised by Government, is to provide resources to implement the plans that are developed.
It is also important to continue to understand that we are in an era of adaptive management. This requires analysis of actions, and then taking further action in the best way possible. We must not assume we have all the answers, so we must monitor outcomes and if we are not achieving our goals. We must be prepared to try another tack. Monitoring and evaluation of natural resource outcomes are a fundamental part of the process that must be developed
Acknowledgments
My thanks to so many people who have helped me understand the community-government partnership in natural resource management. In particular past and present members of the Community Advisory Committee of the Murray Darling Basin Commission and the members of the Lake Eyre Basin Coordinating Group with whom I have had the privilege of working. Many of the ideas in this paper have been developed by the Landcare Sub-Committee of the ACT Environment Advisory Committee and I owe particular thanks to the Chair of the group Val Wiseman for her insights and commitment.
References
Industry Commission (1998) A Full Repairing Lease. Inquiry into Ecologically Sustainable Land Management, Report No 12. Commonwealth of Australia.
Postel, Sandra (1999) Pillars of Sand. Can the Irrigation Miracle Last. Norton & Co. New York. 312pp.
Wiseman, Val (1998) strengthening the Landcare Community-Government Partnership. Discussion paper to ACT Environment Advisory Committee. Canberra.