Evaluation Of Policy Approaches To Dryland Salinity Management In The Kent River Catchment
Elizabeth A. Kington and Keith R.J. Smettem
Department of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition, The University of Western Australia, Nedlands 6907, Western Australia, Australia. Email ekington@agric.uwa.edu.au
Abstract
To date, the Australian government has attempted to use various legislative and policy initiatives to manage the spread of dryland salinity and protect the natural environment. Despite these initiatives, the area of land affected by dryland salinity continues to increase and may now be difficult to control using existing management capabilities.
This paper evaluates three quite different approaches to dryland salinity management have been attempted in the Kent River catchment, located in the southwest of Western Australia (regulatory, co-operative and market driven). The implementation and impact of each management approach are assessed within their respective historical, social and environmental contexts. The assessment reveals that existing regulatory and co-operative approaches have implementation problems and have not been effective in controlling dryland salinity at the catchment scale.
It is concluded that although current policy evaluation methods are somewhat underdeveloped, it is possible to combine a number of evaluation approaches in order to gain insight into the advantages and disadvantages of economic and behavioural incentives to manage salinity problems.
Introduction
The upper reaches of the Kent River catchment are significantly affected by dryland salinity and waterlogging problems, in common with many other catchments in the south west of Western Australia (WA).
Widespread land clearing since the 1960s has resulted in rising groundwater and mobilisation of salt stored in the regolith. The visible symptoms vary from obvious salt scalds of bare unproductive land, to seasonally waterlogged areas where the effects of salinity can be more subtle, resulting in changes to pasture species composition, plant senescence, and lost productivity. Land clearing has caused saline and silted creek-lines, degraded river quality, destroyed the riparian habitat and led to the demise and local extinction of native ecosystems and species .
The full extent of this degradation and its trends over time are poorly known. Outflow of water and salt from the entire Kent River catchment has been measured at the Styx Junction gauging station (No. S604053) and outflow from the upper catchment at Rocky Gully gauging station (No. S604001) since 1956.
Since the first European explorations in the early 19th Century, parts of this region have been described as brackish swampland. Two of the first explorers of the southwest, Dr Wilson in 1829 and Captain Septimus Roe in 1835, both noted that the Kent River was fast flowing, deep and fresh and the surrounding country was mainly flat open grassland. However, watering holes were very often saline, making drinking water difficult to find . These accounts represent the oldest (and some of only a few) existing records of the Kent River catchment environment in its pristine condition, and identify natural expressions of salinity before land was settled and cleared. The relevance of this within a policy evaluation is that no matter how effective, salinity management will never remove all salt expressions.
This region of Western Australia was one of the first settled and the Kent river water remained potable until 1965 (Steering Committee, 1989). By this time agriculture was yielding large harvests, propelled by generous bank loans, good rainfall, agricultural mechanisation and improved plant varieties , encouraging large-scale land clearance.
The Kent River drainage basin covers 73553 hectares and is subjected to a Mediterranean climate of temperate winters and hot summers. The average annual runoff is 80 905 ML and nearly 40 percent of the total flow comes from the upper catchment, where the land use is predominantly pastured for production of wool from merino sheep. Since 1961, 40 percent of the native vegetation in the lower catchment has been protected from clearing within a State Forest. The upper catchment was zoned for agricultural land, largely cleared and there are now about 120 land-title holders, mostly farmers. The Kent River today is too saline to drink, salinity threatens up to 20 percent of farmland and waterlogging problems currently affect 75 percent of the land area .
The salinity problem can be traced to the upper catchment by performing hydrograph and salt load separation on data from the river gauging stations. By deducting the upper catchment flow and salt load from the total catchment flow and salt load and then dividing the salt load by the flow to obtain the concentration, it can be shown that since the 1980s (at least) water running off or discharging from the lower catchment has been (more or less) potable (Figure 1). This shows that policies aimed at reducing river salinity levels should focus on reducing the salinity input to the river from the predominantly cleared upper catchment.
Figure 1. River salinity concentrations for the upper and lower catchments of the Kent river from 1979 to 1995 Data supplied courtesy of Water and Rivers Commission (2000).
This paper evaluates the development and implementation of dryland salinity management policies in the upper Kent River catchment. The evaluation forms part of the PhD study of the first author and seeks to ascertain if the policies have aided dryland salinity management and, if not, whether it is because the policies are flawed or because the environmental problem is intractable due to other reasons. It is useful to commence by determining the technical tractability of the problem.
Tractability of the Salinity Problem
Human-induced dryland salinity is the product of a physically altered landscape ecology that has unbalanced the hydrological cycle on a large scale. Land clearing allows additional water to reach the groundwater table, which then mobilises the salt in the soil increasing the salinity levels of rivers. The effect on the land may not be expressed for many decades after native vegetation has been cleared and for regional aquifers, a new hydrological equilibrium may not be reached for up to 200 years . In some cases, salinity expressions resulting from localised through-flow over impermeable layers can occur far more rapidly .
Dixon. et al. (1998) modelled the hydrology of the upper Kent River catchment. They concluded that in order to reduce discharge and salt loads from the upper catchment, 37 percent of cleared areas required additional revegetation with trees on the lower slopes. This gives a total of 67 percent of the catchment under trees. The focus on lower slope plantings is to remove water moving laterally by subsurface flow from upslope. If this proportion of lower slope planting is not achieved then it is suggested that a much larger percentage of the upper catchment might need to be revegetated to achieve similar reductions in salt loads entering the river. Within policy, there is still is no consensus on the technical processes and priorities for management.
The modelling work highlights a need for catchment farmers to strategically manage land in order to reduce saline discharge to the river, but management of river salinity problems is not necessarily the same as management required to address the spread of soil salinity problems. Implementation of the proposed replanting strategy to address soil salinity problems would radically alter existing agricultural practices , and farmers are unlikely to voluntarily implement the necessary land use changes when both economic and behavioural incentives are lacking .
Together, all this suggests that dryland salinity management is faced with some inherently intractable technical problems, which differ from irrigation salinity management problems where water flow can (potentially) be more easily identified and controlled, as has been identified in the Murray-Darling Basin in Eastern Australia .
How can Dryland Salinity Policies be Evaluated?
Policy analysts have defined many difficulties with evaluating environmental policy, declaring the need for a new inter-disciplinary approach . In general, it is suggested that the nature of environmental management is rarely accommodated adequately within policy approaches. The lack of information about the status of the environment makes evaluation especially difficult (Dovers, 1995). The traditional policy or program evaluation methodology has been criticised as top-down and single disciplinary in perspective , often resulting in only partial description of the whole policy picture. Disparate evaluation methodologies add only ad-hoc knowledge to the discipline of policy evaluation research . Consequently, as a research discipline, environmental policy evaluation is particularly underdeveloped and no adequate framework or methodologies exist for examining the whole environmental policy process .
Policy implementation has been traditionally described as a top-down or linear extension process consisting of three simple stages: the policy, its implementation and policy consequences. Policy evaluations of this process have generally sought to assess its appropriateness, efficiency and effectiveness . Bellamy suggests that Australian Government perception of evaluation as the systematic assessment of programs has been aimed at assisting managers to provide a basis for fund allocation and accountability. This paper attempts to evaluate the policy, its implementation constraints and its effectiveness at managing dryland salinity problems in the Kent River catchment. The evaluation of dynamic policy implementation processes being so inherently difficult, analysis using the ‘building blocks’ described by Mitchell (1991) for Integrated Catchment Management (ICM) will be useful to assess the adequacy of policies to fulfil key policy requirements.
Within environmental policy analysis, biophysical and economic indicators and evaluation against benchmarks are popular because they have the least transaction cost. They are most easy to define and use and can be simple to quantify . International development organisations push economic policy evaluation tools to the forefront of environmental evaluation research (for example, Smith ). Evaluation methods such as Benefit Cost Analysis (BCA), Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and, to some extent, Social Impact Assessment (SIA), which are based on an attempt to sum everyone’s utility, are simple, efficient and cost less to apply, compared to other more cumbersome evaluation techniques. Benefit Cost Analysis remains unrivalled in its popularity as a policy evaluation tool .
As a consequence of bio-physical complexity, system interconnectedness and community ethics, the evaluation of environmental policy requires something more multidimensional than these simple, utilitarian and linear assessment tools. Evaluation methods should be developed more according to the problem because too often "the methodological dog is used to wag the problematic tail" . Applied policies in the social and political environment share also the same historical context, an important consideration for a complete understanding of policy . As a consequence of the growing severity, urgency and inherent complexity of environmental problems, use of detailed policy ‘mapping’ is often not possible to determine the right analysis methodology to use. Instead, techniques to assess policy implementation are increasingly used as an evaluation tools to pinpoint environmental policy failure.
Dryland Salinity Policy
The majority of policies designed to protect the environment tend to be formulated in reaction to environmental crises and lack well-defined objectives and sufficiently long time-frames for effective change. Dovers (1995) lists 20 components required for an effective environmental policy program and points out that in Australia, implemented policies failed to satisfy most of these components.
The task of evaluating environment policy performance and financial accountability has been declared to be too difficult to assess by policy auditors because the evolutionary nature of natural resource management policy objectives has not been easy to measure using traditional performance auditing methods .
The Three Policy Approaches In The Kent River Catchment
Since the 1970s, three policy approaches have been implemented to address growing salinity problems. They are identified here by the driving policy mechanism behind each as, regulatory, co-operative and market-driven. Other policies of significance have also influenced salinity management in this and other areas. They are: the WA Soil and Land Conservation (SALC) Act (1945) and in particular amendments in 1982 when Land Conservation District Committees were set up, The National Decade of Landcare Program (NDLP) which extended through the 1990’s (and its predecessor the National Soil Conservation Program (NSCP)) have been influential. While each of the policies being considered here has been developed in isolation and has its own internal objectives, which can be assessed, they also overlap significantly (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. The periods of State policies to address dryland salinity since 1975, affecting the Kent River catchment.
The Regulatory Approach: Country Areas Water Supply Act 1947
In 1947, the Kent River water was designated as a future potable supply and the catchment land came under the jurisdiction of the Country Areas Water Supply Act. Under the Act, the Governor may define catchment boundaries, extend or alter water catchment boundaries, unite two or more catchment areas and abolish catchments. The Act also gives the Minister the powers to divert, intercept and store all stream water and to take water found on or under the land. Any person who causes or permits the indigenous undergrowth, bush, or trees on land to be removed, destroyed or extensively damaged will receive a fine not exceeding $1000, and would be made to restore and land with tree cover (see the Country Areas and Water Supply Act 1947 (WA) Sections 9,11,11A,12A, 12B(I&II) & 17).
As an extension to potable water appropriation for the State in 1978, the Government selected the Kent and three other river catchments with the objective of bringing them back to potable levels. They were included in an amendment to the 1947 Country Areas Water Supply Act. As part of the amendment, a policy was implemented to protect these rivers from rapidly increasing salinity through a catchment clearing ban. Until the 1960s most of these river salinity levels were below the World Health Organisation drinking water standard of 500 mgL-1. Other southwest rivers that extended further inland were already brackish and considered beyond recovery. The state’s southwest ‘intermediate’ rivers were still not appropriated, but only a few were sited in areas of consistent flow, had a low population and could be dammed.
To encourage restoration of the catchment land, the government initially purchased some farms in an already dammed catchment and re-planted the farmland with trees . Such an expense, however, would have been high and undesirable for the whole or newly selected catchments. By this time 64 percent of the Kent River catchment had been cleared for agriculture, which was more than the other chosen catchments. When a land-clearing ban was ‘overnight’ extended to the three new catchments it caused uproar amongst the farming community. The newspapers of 1979 declared that farmers would be defiant and clear lands anyway despite the warnings of legal action .
Compensated costs to farmer not to clear more land in the chosen catchments had by 1996 cost the tax payer a total of $34 million, with a further $10 million in re-forestation and land purchase costs (Viv Read, WRC Salinity Management Program Coordinator, pers. comm., 1999).
The Public Works Department monitored and evaluated this clearing control policy through stream quality testing and aerial photography. This role to the Water Authority of Western Australia (WAWA) when it replaced the PWD in 1985, and was passed on to the Water and Rivers Commission (WRC) in 1996. Unfortunately over the years, the aerial monitoring of tree cover to assess illegal land clearing did not pick up the evident destruction of the forest understorey, which was to prove to be an unfortunate short-fall of both the policy and the remote monitoring method. In 1989, the Steering Committee for Research on Land Use and Water Supply published a report stating that the Kent (and other) river salinity levels had increased dramatically. Meanwhile, the percentage of the upper catchment land that had been cleared had remained the same.
The effect of this clearing control policy on salinity levels was significantly diminished because only one fifth of the uncleared land had been protected. The understorey was over-grazed or completely removed from 79 percent of uncleared farmland and most uncleared areas were left unfenced, allowing livestock access . The removal of this lower and middle storey vegetation eliminated up to half of the recharge control potential of the intact native forest . Information about the condition of this uncleared land was not assessed and published until 1992 . Compliance with this policy was barely enforced with one notable case of a Kent River farmer fined for illegal clearing. It was well known by the farming community that other illegal clearing was taking place. Farmers were not expected to spend any of the compensation money to fence-off uncleared land or limit stock access and many used the lump sum payments to retire debt.
In summary, despite working as a policy to prevent land-clearing, policy enforcement and compliance was not well administered and the policy was rushed in without acknowledging or addressing implementation problems in time. This policy was an attempt by the State water authority to impose a clearing ban on privately managed agricultural land. Farmers considered the policy to be excessive government interference, and although it may have slowed the rate of salinity increases it did not prevent further rises in river salinity levels. The key criticism was that farmers were never required to fence.
The Co-operative Policy Approach: Integrated Catchment Management 1989
In WA, the need for integrated natural resource management first became apparent when eutrophication problems emerged in populated estuary and harbour areas in the southwest during the 1970s. It was realised that to address such problems would require control of land use over large areas to better manage catchment run-off. Farm fertiliser and industrial effluent draining into rivers were identified as major sources of estuary pollution .
The WA Government Integrated Catchment Management (ICM) policy document was introduced in 1989 as the first attempt at providing an overarching ‘umbrella’ to natural resource management . It sought to integrate land, water and vegetation management and to balance resource use and conservation needs. It did not take long for this policy to lose favour with politicians, and implementing agencies were reluctant to accommodate it within existing management structures. Within seven years the ICM policy had become marginalized as an environmental management policy in WA. Committed and dedicated agency personnel, community catchment groups and the small government Office of Catchment Management were powerless, in the face of larger interests, to maintain the momentum of institutional re-structuring and community development needed to deliver an effective ICM approach. The Office of Catchment Management was officially disbanded in 1996 after being shunted around through various government agencies.
ICM was described as an educational, co-operative, philosophical and managerial policy process that would embrace and resolve environmental decision-making and management, and ensure resolution of implementation problems. It was hoped that it would lead to reduced land degradation, resolve conflicting government policies, lessen agency statutory responsibilities and increase public involvement in decision-making .
In 1990, an evaluation of ICM policy implementation suggested five ‘building blocks’ that should be accommodated for successful implementation . Essentially, ICM should incorporate a systems approach that is integrated, stakeholder driven, has balanced ecological and social goals and has well defined partnerships between stakeholders.
As the chosen WA focus catchment for the National Dryland Salinity Program (NDSP) in 1993, a major Kent River catchment project would use the ICM policy approach to focus a Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation (LWRRDC) 5-year research program. It was to be developed as an integrated research, development and extension project which was customer-driven, involved stakeholders, was collaborative, multi-disciplinary, avoided duplication, and was transferable on a State basis .
Within the Kent ICM program many individual small-scale on-ground and large-scale research projects were conducted as part of focus catchment and National Program objectives. Catchment committees defined goals and implemented dryland salinity management strategies. A program budget of AUS$300 000 (US$182 800) for dryland salinity management was channelled into numerous government research projects and publications, while three community groups obtained federal Natural Heritage Trust (NHT) funding for landcare projects as a result of their involvement in the National Dryland Salinity Program.
As an educational and promotional policy approach, ICM policy is inherently difficult to evaluate, especially so soon after implementation. The evaluator must somehow take into account, or measure the effect of, the many networks of people that have been formed and ideas that have been spread. Fox suggests the impact of such processes cannot be known for decades.
The BCA conducted as part of the ICM plan determined that sale of the potable water would be necessary to make catchment rehabilitation cost effective (an option that other WA river catchments do not enjoy). Without this option, the BCA results indicated that it would only be economic to plant the best land to commercial tree crops, leaving a large proportion of the upper catchment in a degraded state that would cost more to repair than the land was worth.
By evaluating ICM against the approach proposed by Mitchell (1991), we suggest that the program was not community-driven, with members of State agencies dominating the committee decision-making process. The focus was really on research for, rather than community driven catchment management. There was no social research or management process developed for the implementation of integrated management options. The lack of a common vision or language between government and community stakeholders was not exposed, therefore conflicting issues went unresolved within an ICM plan that could not then be implemented.
Analysis of the policy framework revealed firstly, a deficiency in understanding holistic management (which ICM should have been addressing). This, combined with the lack of experience on how to implement it, and the scarce resources which were provided, essentially left a few dedicated individuals the task of implementing a policy that was largely institutionally unsupported. Secondly, without an implementation process or legal framework in place to enforce policy, centralised catchment authorities lacked the tools to implement catchment plans. Finally, we also suggest that the natural resource agency managers found the praxis of ICM philosophy to be potentially antagonistic to their individual program agendas, and they therefore provided minimal co-operation. Government policy fails when it is not institutionally supported .
Towards the end of the NDSP in the Kent River catchment, the Water and Rivers Commission (WRC) took over as lead agency from Agriculture, Western Australia (AgWest). The WRC initially had no management structure or procedure in place to instigate salinity management strategies along ICM lines, despite the LWRRDC and the NDSP having supposedly endorsed an ICM process for the upper catchment. The critical mass needed from community participation for catchment salinity management had not been obtained and major conflicting interests remained unresolved.
In 1997, during the fourth year of the five-year program, a farmer survey was undertaken in the Kent River catchment as part of this study. Farmers were asked to quantify salinity management abatement activities within the catchment and to assess farm community participation and adoption levels. Survey questionnaires were sent out to all 120 upper catchment farmers in May 1996 and by October, 53 percent had returned completed forms representing 69 percent of the upper catchment land area.
The survey results showed that although the adoption of landcare practices by Kent River farmers increased from 1995 to 1997 (Figure 3), there was still insufficient implementation to abate or recover saline land, either for themselves or as part of an integrated catchment management plan . Most importantly, against the time frame of hydrological equilibrium and spatial spread of cause and effect, the co-operative policy was clearly not providing enough incentive (economic or behavioural) for farmers to halt the spread of land degradation problems.
Figure 3. Adoption of dryland salinity management options for 1995 and 1997 by Kent River catchment farmers.
Commercial Opportunism: the WA Salt Action Plan, 1996
A new policy strategy was introduced before the end of the National Dryland Salinity Program in the Kent River catchment specifically to address dryland salinity problems. Initiated as a result of community concerns about the lack of Government salinity policy, the WA Salinity Action Plan (SAP) was orchestrated by the executives and scientists of four natural resource government agencies; Agriculture Western Australia (AgWA), Conservation and Land Management (CALM), Water and Rivers Commission (WRC), and to a lesser extent, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). Within this new policy strategy the Kent River was designated a public drinking water recovery area and could now obtain significant funding to achieve this objective over the ensuing 30 years. Within the SAP, the primary policy mechanism targeting the Kent River catchment was to encourage farm forestry and prepare and implement catchment plans in cooperation with the community. The Asian paper industry preference for bluegum (Eucalyptus gobulus) tree woodchips, which in WA grow to maturity within only 10 years, created a profitable new market opportunity for government, business and farmers within this high rainfall region of WA. The promotion of commercially-driven farm forestry within the Kent River catchment was already underway, supported by CALM’s woodchip industry (and WRC river water recovery) objectives. However, catchment farmers did not emulate this enthusiasm.
By surveying government records, farmer and other information sources, we have found that by 1998, up to 12 percent of farmers had sold or leased the whole farm property to plantation companies (Figure 4). There was commercial interest in a further 8 percent and it was predicted that, in total, up to 30 percent of farms could sell-out to the tree plantation companies in the future . Although this would result in revegetation of over 37 percent of the upper Kent catchment, the revegetation would be in ad hoc locations and not strategically located on lower slope positions. In consequence, it seems likely that further replanting would be required in order to meet the salt reduction target of 550 mgl-1.
Figure 4. Bluegum plantation development in the upper Kent River catchment above gauging station S564001. Diagram supplied courtesy of Water and Rivers Commission (2000).
The adjacent Denmark River catchment is another of the water recovery catchments where bluegum tree plantations (planted since 1990) now cover 80 percent of catchment land area. The Denmark River salinity level is now decreasing and, assuming that it continues dropping, would make this policy approach effective as a catchment treatment for controlling river (and land) salinity problems. However, as a higher rainfall catchment this option has been entirely commercially driven because of relatively high potential plantation yields over the entire catchment.
A BCA of profit per hectare from bluegums compared to wool explains why some (especially older) farmers have sold their whole farms to the new bluegum plantation companies. The social costs and benefits to the local community and economy of a forestry plantation environment are not measured against the apparent salinity management success. There is growing concern that corporate, absentee land ownership, employment changes and vacated farms will inevitably change the social and economic infrastructure , as it has affected communities in New Zealand plantation areas . When assessed using the methodology of Mitchell (1991), this market-driven policy lacks an integrated approach, and is not balanced with social or ecological goals. The apparent onus of responsibility has been with the government and not the farmers to develop on-farm policy approaches to prevent land degradation, while the developing Landcare ethics under the National Decade of Landcare encouraged on-farm environmental responsibility by the farmers themselves.
Policies are not always chosen because they are the most appropriate for the management problem, but often because they are politically acceptable. Currently, the trend is towards market mechanisms, which do not challenge systemic land management problems but find new ways to develop, and hence reduce the potential for conflict .
Conclusions
Salinity problems in the Kent River catchment have been addressed sequentially since 1947 by three very different policies. We have attempted to analyse and compare these using a variety of evaluation approaches and methodologies and to move away from the traditionally narrow approaches to policy evaluation. Mitchell’s (1991) guiding ICM principles have also thrown some light on dryland salinity policy design and operation. Refinement to methods of determining policy effectiveness allowing broader insights, improved management systems, as well as creating a ‘policy learning’ environment, will ultimately lead to more informed policies.
Dryland salinity policies implemented in the Kent River catchment have been based on very different compliance mechanisms and it was found that often policies themselves are inadequate because they have not been well planned and implemented, not necessarily because their instruments are inherently weak.
It was identified that there was little responsibility by community and government to endorse a purely regulatory approach. The policy prevented further clearing but in the Kent river catchment, clearing was already so far advanced that neither regulation nor money spent by the WRC (until 1996) compensating farmers not to clear land in the Kent River catchment, were effective at reducing river salinity levels to acceptable drinking levels.
The ICM approach has been ineffective because the government agencies, farmers and markets do not necessarily work for the collective good against their individual interests. ICM could possibly be improved if behavioural change leading to increased environmental responsibility by the community was embraced by all stakeholders.
Market opportunities (i.e. plantation forestry) may be the most effective in terms of adoption. However, commercial trees are often grown on best soils where salt risk is least. Their use can also lead to long-term local social and environmental problems with what is essentially a new monoculture. The social needs of existing farm communities are not necessarily accommodated within a purely commercially-driven or regulatory policy which provide financial incentives to ensure widespread adoption, but lack appropriate incentives to change land-degrading behaviour. In contrast, promotional and educational policies that have no financial incentives to offer do not overcome the problem of policy enforcement and therefore compliance does not reach critical mass.
What has been noted about all three approaches to salinity management is that they have not been systematic enough in terms of following the criteria of Dovers (1995), even a simple policy checklist, such as: policy formation, implementation and evaluation. In spite of this, selected catchments have experienced some success in slowing-down salinity expression, but it is proposed that success will only occur when a systematic policy approach of whatever variety (including social, environmental and economic) is committed to by the government. Without a planned approach incorporating strategic replanting of high recharge areas, it seems likely that salinity control will only be achieved by major replanting of most of the present agricultural land.
Finally, given the long time scales required to contain the spread of dryland salinity it could be asked whether policy strategies should now focus on minimising the inevitable social and environmental impacts, and therefore extending current policy beyond its almost exclusive focus on dryland salinity management.
Acknowledgement
Funding for this research was provided by the Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation, Canberra, Australia. Ian Parker, Dr Geoff Syme, Honorary Fellow Dr Henry P. Schapper, Dr John Pickard, Mr Viv Read of the WA Water and Rivers Commission, and Associate Professor David Pannell are thanked for their comments and support.
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Citation: Kington, E.A. and Smettem, K.R.J. (2000). Evaluation Of Policy Approaches To Dryland Salinity Management In The Kent River Catchment, SEA News, Issue 7, Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Western Australia. http://www.general.uwa.edu.au/u/dpannell/spap0001.htm.
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