The management of natural resources located on private lands often involves a perceived conflict between the mix of private and public benefit outputs they produce. Governments have tended to respond through legislation to restrict and redirect private decisions about resource management. However, the legislative response faces a lack of information about the costs and benefits of alternative management and policy instruments. A pertinent example of this debate is the management of wetlands on private lands. The goal in this thesis is to advance the design of policy relating to the production of environmental outputs on private lands. This goal is achieved by first estimating the welfare impacts of alternative private land management strategies on the wider community. These estimates are used as inputs into the development of alternative policy instruments that are then evaluated in terms of their potential cost-effectiveness in influencing private management. Two case studies of wetland management on private land in Australia are presented ??? the Upper South East Region of South Australia, and, the Murrumbidgee River Floodplain in New South Wales. The conceptual approach described in the first part of the thesis includes a description of the resource management problem and the strengths and weaknesses of the alternative decision frameworks widely employed in Australia. Identification of the cause and nature of transaction costs in the management process is the focus in this discussion. The welfare impacts of alternative wetland management strategies are investigated through the construction of a bio-economic model for each of the case study areas. The approach integrates biophysical analysis of changing wetland management with the value society places on wetlands. Outputs from this process are used in the development of a range of policy instruments directed towards influencing wetland management. The impact of poorly quantified and uncertain transaction costs on the potential cost-effectiveness of these options is evaluated using threshold policy analysis. The empirical results show that the perception of a conflict between the private and public values generated by resource management is accurate. For example, scenarios changing wetland management in the Upper South East of South Australia on the Murrumbidgee River floodplain in New South Wales were shown to generate net benefits of $5.2m and $5.1m respectively. Hence, changing wetland management could generate increased community welfare. The potential for these findings to be translated into wetland policy is less conclusive. Policies directed towards wetland management (in part or in whole) incur a range of transaction costs and deliver differential wetland protection benefits. Ten ???best bet??? policies are identified, but more information is required to determine conclusively whether a net benefit results to the wider community when transaction costs are included.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/273572 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Whitten, Stuart Max, Business, Australian Defence Force Academy, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales - Australian Defence Force Academy. School of Business |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Stuart Max Whitten, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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