2.2 Historical periods
2.2.7 The Turn of the Century (2000–5)
Division (Allison et al., 1993) as a basis for decision-making. This zoning scheme was developed originally as a means to aid the Environmental Protec- tion Authority in the assessment of applications of Notices of Intent to clear native vegetation on environmental grounds. The scheme was a general biophysical framework that could be adopted for other natural resource decision-making processes. A natural resource zone was defined as an area of land where people can affect changes in the landscape by their activities, for example, part of a river catchment. It was considered to be an area that people could relate to and feel a sense of belonging, particularly in terms of vegetation and landforms (Allison et al., 1993). Although an EPP was proposed by the WA Conservation Council to address the cumulative impacts of land clearing at this time, there was little political support for restricting land clearing on the basis of environmental protection and natural resource degradation, and the development of an EPP for the protection of native vegetation was never progressed.
short of the integrated framework for natural resource management conceived in the discussion document. As its name suggested it had a narrower focus on salinity and water quality. To counter criticism on the narrow scope, the NAP was identified as an initial step and left the broader issues of conservation of biological diversity for future attention, and any commitment to future action (and therefore Australian Government funding) was conditional on bilateral agreements with the States and Territories. The goal of the NAP was to motivate and enable regional communities to target action to prevent, stabilise and reverse trends in soil salinity affecting sustainability of produc- tion and the viability of infrastructure, to improve water quality and secure reliable water allocations for human uses, industry and the environment.
The Australian Government established a framework for investing in natural resource management in partnership with State and Territory Governments through binding agreements, specifically Intergovernmental Agreements covering the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality (NAP) and the extension of the Natural Heritage Trust (NHT2). The framework included the requirement to establish regional integrated natural resource management strategies that are jointly accredited by the Australian Government and the relevant State or Territory Government. Fifty-six regions were identified covering all of Australia and a natural resource management plan was developed for each.
The Australian Government committed $700 million to the NAP over seven years 2002–8. State and Territory Governments collectively matched this funding providing a total of $1.4 billion. Bilateral Agreements provide for the allocation of $1.4 billion over seven years through the NAP between the States and Territories, and $300 million over four years for NHT2. Western Australia’s contribution of $158 million is matched by $158 million from the Australian Government and the total amount will be largely delivered through the six Western Australian natural resource management regional groups between 2005 and 2008. In addition there will be significant levels of funding to community and industry groups through the Envirofund and the National Landcare Program. The funding through these programs is additional to ongoing State funding for natural resource funding of $240 million in 2003–4 and similar amounts in ongoing years.
The WA Government signed a bilateral agreement with the Australian Government in 2002 (Government of Western Australia, 2002b) to initiate the NAP in Western Australia, coordinated and delivered by the newly formed Natural Resource Management Council through the WA State Natural Resource Policy (Government of Western Australia, 2001). The WA Government’s framework took a broader approach than the NAP to
assist in achieving sustainable natural resource management. This was a purposeful move towards a partnership model based on the principles of ESD. It had as its goal the conservation and sustainable management of the State’s natural resources, with efficient and effective partnerships between all levels of government, industry and the community as an important tool to achieve its goals. One of the key objectives was to establish a frame- work for a coordinated and integrated approach by the four key agencies (Department of Agriculture, the Department of Conservation and Land Management, the Department of Environmental Protection and the Water and Rivers Commission) as required by the NAP, that is, the integrating function once performed by the OCM for 1990–4. The framework also laid out the structure of partnerships between the State Government and the six regional natural resource management groups already established in Western Australia, thus linking the three hierarchical institutional levels responsible for natural resource management, national, state and regional levels. The lack of coordinated institutional arrangements has often been identified as a major impediment to the effective implementation of natural resource management in Australia (Young and Gunningham, 1997; Mobbs and Dovers, 1999;
Toyne and Farley, 2000; Dovers, 2001) and salinity in Western Australia (Kington, 2000) and, therefore, the NAP was seen as a promising step to fill the gap. The partnership model was designed to encompass regional-scale issues from a strategic management perspective in an integrated participatory approach. This relatively new process evolved from the ICM approach of the late 1980s and considerable effort was directed towards developing partnership models to deal with the challenges that arose in this approach;
for example, the change from individual level to group level agricultural extension activity. The delivery of natural resource management through this program of regionalisation constitutes an attempt at an adaptive management process at the landscape scale.
The WA Government released a draft State Sustainability Strategy in September 2002 (Government of Western Australia, 2002a) and the final strategy in September 2003 (Government of Western Australia, 2003) (the Strategy) with the express purpose of comprehensively addressing sustain- ability through simultaneous environmental, social and economic improve- ment. The Strategy identified that natural resource management policies contained only some elements of sustainability focussing on the integration of the biophysical sciences and economics. The Strategy recognised the impor- tance of improving the way in which community values may be incorporated into policy. It also addressed briefly the opportunity for increasing the sustain- ability of agriculture under the rubric of sustainable use of natural resources,
while recognising and acknowledging the enormity of the task. The opportuni- ties included low-input agriculture to meet future market needs, accreditation systems and mechanisms to create value for ecosystem services.