Regional natural resource management (NRM) groups in Australia manage a wide range of natural resources and environmental assets, including biodiversity, soils, water, wetlands, native plants and animals.
Regional NRM groups use a range of tools to achieve their management targets. To date, positive price instruments such as subsidies and grants have been the most widely used policies. Regional managers have typically employed non-competitive approaches such as fixed grant payments, which have also generally targeted management actions without necessarily measuring resource outcomes.
More recently, there has been interest in the use of ‘market-like’ instruments, such as tenders and auctions, which employ competitive means to allocate funding and focus more on natural resource outcomes such as biodiversity, in-stream salinity or water quality.
Innovative new MBIs are also being developed to address much more specific objectives in areas as diverse as habitat for ground-nesting birds, weed control and integrated pest management. In addition, a new generation of spatially integrated MBIs are showing potential in achieving coordinated landscape outcomes. For example, an auction for native vegetation corridors across a landscape has been held in the Desert Uplands of Queensland.
These mechanisms offer new ways to achieving landscape management goals through voluntary incentives in ways that were previously thought implausible or highly unlikely. They are proving effective in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of on-ground funding assistance and there is significant potential to develop MBI applications as vehicles for coordinating broader sources of funding for environmental management.
For example, funding from offset schemes could be channelled through existing or new tender instruments in order to increase effectiveness. There is also the potential to develop more sophisticated MBIs that share the costs of achieving landscape scale change amongst communities. Finally, there are opportunities to develop and combine instruments such as broader carbon offsets, water quality management and biodiversity corridors in order to achieve coordinated objectives through a single instrument with funding from different sources.
Experience demonstrates the potential for sound development and implementation of MBIs at the regional scale. Regional NRM groups hold extensive local knowledge, project management and implementation experience and land manager engagement capacity. Combining their extensive skill and capacity resources with sound MBI selection and design is likely to lead to sound MBI outcomes tailored to local community needs and targets. |