The catchment care principle: A new equity principle for environmental policy, with advantages for efficiency and adaptive governance

Achieving a working consensus on how to divide the costs of achieving environmental objectives between resource users and the general community is a key part of mobilizing the policy changes and public resources required to address major resource management challenges in Australia and elsewhere. Existing approaches to this issue have not been able to resolve a maladaptive stand-off between those emphasizing a ‘polluter pays’ approach that imposes costs on resource users and a ‘beneficiary pays’ approach which may privilege an unsustainable status quo. This paper outlines ‘the catchment care principle’ advocated by the Wentworth Group [Wentworth Group, 2002. 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>], 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’. The principle is interpreted as implying that resource management practices should not damage ecosystem integrity, while accepting that significant ecosystem modification might be consistent with maintaining a healthy working landscape. The paper also argues that the ‘catchment care’ principle offers a principle-based approach that encourages burden sharing rather than a winner takes all political game, and is likely to enhance the ability of societies to craft constructive policy responses to some of our most difficult environmental challenges. In addition to encouraging more adaptive governance and the protection of ecosystem integrity, the paper argues that the application of the catchment care principle provides a middle ground anchoring point for the political negotiation of policy changes. This is likely to encourage more socially efficient outcomes by reducing incentives to invest in economically unproductive lobbying activity and by encouraging political outcomes that diverge less from underlying social preferences.