David Bennett, FAIAST

NRMC Pty Ltd, Natural Resource Management Consultants, 14/70 Elder Place, Fremantle Western Australia, 6160
 

Abstract

Government run Integrated Catchment Management (ICM) has been practised for a long time in harnessed catchments to supply fresh water to cities, to control nutrient accession by regulation in these and other catchments and to control floods in some catchments. But the ability of non-statutory or quasi-government organisations to resolve less tractable catchment problems, such as reductions in stream salinity or some forms of land degradation, is questioned. This is because the catchment is the wrong scale to solve some problems and the community is not always the right organisation to solve them. Involvement of catchment communities rapidly increases the costs of catchment planning, is likely to be a constraint on optimal catchment plans and may well retard catchment remediation measures and increase their cost. The catchment community is likely to be neither the main beneficiary nor the main funding agency. Nevertheless, involving the catchment community in resolving catchment problems reduces the likelihood of political backlash and can lead to better solutions due to local knowledge.

Some proponents of Community ICM (C-ICM) now appear to view ICM bodies as vehicles to approach wider societal and landscape problems for which C-ICM structures are quite inappropriate. In their enthusiasm to resolve a number of the problems of rural societies, proponents of C-ICM are making C-ICM look like the launch of a new religion, or social movement.

Examples of better-focussed ICM in Australia are offered for imitation. In my opinion the National Action Plan for Water Quality and Salinity (NAPSWQ) requires considerable revision, but while it exists, catchment strategists should concentrate on using the community to examine and improve, but not approve, alternative plans, rather then to canvass the many problems of rural Australia that cannot be addressed by catchment bodies.

(Community-based) integrated catchment management

It is important to separate those catchments where the downstream assets are high in value, from those where the downstream assets are limited. The former are often “harnessed catchments”, as most contain dams to control water flow. The best example is the Murray-Darling Basin, where water is well regulated and sold to various users and where quality in the lower reaches exerts profound costs on private and commercial activities in irrigation areas and Adelaide. An example of an “unharnessed catchment” is the Blackwood Basin in Western Australia, where the downstream assets are aesthetic. (Having canoed on the Blackwood below Nannup I appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the River.) In harnessed catchments, especially those supplying fresh water to cities, the preservation of water quality is usually the primary objective. In the unharnessed catchments the preservation of water quality is usually a much lower priority and the preservation of other assets, such as biodiversity and the rural roads and towns within the catchment are likely to rate more highly.

When catchment issues are serious enough, statutory bodies, like the Sydney Catchment Authority [1], or the Hunter Catchment Trust [2], or the Murray-Darling Basin Commission [3] are formed to take action. Similar direct actions have been taken by water supply authorities to control or improve water quality in all states and in the Snowy Mountains.

For example the long history of catchment management in Western Australia indicates that the only bodies able to hold land in a vegetated state, or change land use to halt-the-salt were government bodies: the WA Government Railways from 1897 onwards (Bleazby, 1917), water engineers, like Reynoldson in the Mundaring Catchment from 1909 (WA Government, 1963) and the Public Works Department and Metropolitan Water Board in other water supply catchments in the Darling Range. There has been a renewal of these activities in the Collie Catchment from 1943 (Moore 1943) to the present (see below).

In catchments affected by water quality problems reducing effluent discharge from both human habitations and from intensive animal industries has been performed by providing the necessary funds, promulgating regulations requiring better control of effluents and by charging those who break the law.

More recently, integrated catchment management (ICM) and associated regional structures have been touted as important components of the social structure of rural Australia in the struggle to prevent/reverse land degradation and declines in water quality. This paper looks at the limitations of community-based ICM or C-ICM. This is the form of ICM practised as a consequence of recent pressures to solve problems at a catchment scale, encouraged by the Commonwealth Government in programs like the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality (NAPSWQ) and the Natural Heritage Trust (NHT).

The degree to which C-ICM is becoming part of the mantra for solving problems is illustrated in the information supplied for the NAPSWQ. Objectives of the NAPSWQ include developing:

“Integrated Catchment/Region Management Plans - Developed by the Community
“Catchments/regions (including regions where salinity is not associated with river systems) are the most effective scale at which to engage the community in addressing salinity, particularly dryland salinity, and water quality. The catchment/region units will underpin broader levels of management such as the Murray Darling Basin Salinity Strategy or State/Territory salinity plans.
“Integrated catchment/region management plans will need to be developed by communities within the framework of the standards and targets agreed between the Commonwealth and the States/Territories.
“Plans should be based upon analysis of natural resource problems and priorities carried out at the catchment/region level by local communities assisted by governments in the context of wider regional objectives.”[4] (Italics throughout this quote added by the author.)

The implicit assumption is that all problems to do with salinity and water quality (and a number of others, including “terrestrial biodiversity”), require catchment-scale planning and catchment-scale intervention and the involvement of a significant part of the whole community. Unless an approved, integrated catchment plan has been produced, priorities will be ill-directed and funding unavailable. It is interesting to note that most other federal initiatives, such as drug control, or education, or health do not require the community to develop them. Why should ICM be treated differently?

Is the catchment the right area?

“By focusing only on catchment-scale interventions you may be diverting funds into relatively low priority uses.” (Pannell 2002). Sometimes the catchment is too large to approach the problem: sometimes it is too small, or the problem is not really defined by the catchment’s geographic boundaries.

C-ICM tries to solve all problems at a catchment scale

A number of our problems, like preservation of biodiversity and the control of pest plants and animals, do not conform to catchment boundaries. (The development of bioregions for Australia demonstrates how different regional structures are required for different regional problems [5].) Forcing the administration of these problems into catchment authorities is artificial and probably counterproductive. This forcing may well create inappropriate administrative structures.

C-ICM diverts attention away from competing problems

ICM concentrates attention on problems of the catchment, rather than problems of the region, or the land use activity. The most costly of our natural resource issues are not catchment based. The National Land & Water Resources Audit states: “The gross benefit for dryland salinity is estimated at about $187 million per year, around 3% of total profits from agriculture. This can be compared to about $1,585 million per year for acidity and $1,035 million per year for sodicity.” (NLWRA, 2003). Because of the mantra of ICM, there may be too little resources devoted to addressing these two and many other problems that are perceived to be manageable at a smaller scale.

Often social and engineering interventions can treat catchment hotspots

There are many examples of social/institutional policy tools that operate at scales other than the catchment, including environmental allocations on the Macquarie, the Namoi, the Lachlan and other tributaries of the Murray-Darling system, helping to preserve the biodiversity of these rivers.

There are also many examples of relatively localised engineering interventions, including engineering works to protect Toolibin Lake, the Peel-Harvey Estuary and salinity-threatened rural towns. Toolibin Lake is becoming more saline as a consequence of overland flow and rising groundwater from a paleo-channel. The former problem has been reduced by a diversion bank and drain and the latter problem has been treated by groundwater pumping. Pumping has also been used to address the salinity problems of Merredin, Wagga Wagga and a number of other rural towns. Table 1 gives some examples from Western Australia.
 

Table 1. Recommended interventions to prevent salinisation of rural towns in Western Australia, as determined for Rural Towns Program (from Bennett, 2001)

* The modelling study did not include the entire catchment that runs into the town.

Digging the Dawesville Channel to increase water exchange with the ocean was part of the cure for the Peel-Harvey Inlet.
In summary, it is clear that intervention at the catchment scale is not appropriate for a range of particular environmental and resource management problems including, in some cases, dryland salinity.

Is the community the right organization?

The catchment community is seldom the financier

In nearly every case C-ICM bodies have been unable to raise funds internally for catchment works and changes to catchment land management, relying solely on the taxpayer to provide money. (An exception is the Upper South East of South Australia – see later.) This means that the discipline that comes from spending one’s own money may be lacking, and in some cases grandiose schemes get proposed. For example, in Western Australia, two large drainage proposals, one for the Upper Blackwood catchment and the other for the Beacon River catchment have now been partially funded by government, with no indication that a levy on landowners is anticipated or needed.

The catchment community may not be the beneficiary

Improvements in water quality from ICM often do not benefit the catchment community directly, but do provide benefits for biodiversity and water resources downstream. In these circumstances, state and federal government departments responsible for conservation and water resources as well as irrigation corporations are the major beneficiaries of the catchment works. It seems unwise to put the responsibility for delivering these out-of-catchment benefits on to the catchment communities themselves. In formulating their plans, one would not be surprised to find the catchment community paying disproportionate attention to benefits and costs to their members, rather than to external stakeholders.

Where the catchment community is the beneficiary, it should pay

Watson (2001) argues that in cases where the beneficiaries of ICM are within the catchment, levies should be raised there to pay for remediation:
“Engineering solutions are applicable to many problems caused by dryland salinity in country towns. While not all damage is worth repairing, local government rates are an ideal funding instrument to finance these engineering works. There will be cases where the local funding base is inadequate and state or Commonwealth support is justified for valuable assets. Much the same goes for roads, railways and other infrastructure affected by dryland salinity. Provided the necessary repairs can pass a cost-benefit test, the best strategy will be recoupment of costs by user charges.” (Watson 2001).

C-ICM is all planning and no management

Pannell (2002) has summarised:
“Usually when people talk about integrated catchment management they are really talking about integrated catchment planning. … Often there seems to be an inadequate appreciation that drawing up a set of plans does not get you to the final outcome of achieving change on the ground. There is a lack of recognition of the need for an incentive of some sort to drive that change on the ground.”

This results in a lot of money being spent on planning and very little being spent on management; complaints that too many useless meetings are held to do “planning”; complaints that a high level of administrative rent is being taken by government agencies to do investigations and planning, with very little is left to actually do things on the ground. My own experience in the Central-West of NSW was that landholders were happy to paint the less useful parts of their farms green in anticipation that some taxpayer would provide the money to plant these parts to attractive trees. There was no calculation as to how effective these small patches of trees would be in preventing downstream salinity, nor even whether there was any social or environmental damage arising as a consequence of previous land clearing.

I can contrast this planning approach with an example of deliberate non-planning. This is the work performed under Keith Bradby’s inspiration in the Peel-Harvey Catchment of Western Australia (Bradby, 1994). In this case community cooperation helped to identify major sources of pollution, and then landowners made small, low cost changes to the landscape. This has considerably reduced the nutrient inflow to the Peel-Harvey Estuary, where algal blooms were threatening the ecosystem and reducing real estate values. A catchment plan was not developed at that time, although one has been recently launched. Bradby argues that three of the assumptions to catchment planning: that it represents a mechanism for change; that it is an enforcement tool and that it is a document with an extended life, are all false.

“A comprehensive and detailed catchment plan would cross too many boundaries. The catchment has been, and continues to be, flooded with various plans, strategies, reports, assessments and other sundry documents, all prepared for different purposes. Local councillors report a current reading load of between 50 and 400 cm a month of such material. A “catchment plan”; a single overall document coming from left field, can never hope to have credibility amongst that sort of competition. Our other option, attempting to reduce duplication, risked bogging the catchment program down in decades of inter-agency argument over whose report and plan had precedence. Having other work to do, we didn’t need that.” (Bradby, 1994).

C-ICM does not have the power to change land use (sufficiently)

There is an implicit assumption in current approaches to ICM that if we all voluntarily change our land uses a little, then we will be able to control and reduce catchment problems. This is not true for salinity. As the hydrologists have improved their estimates, the proportion of land required to be in perennial species to control the movement of saline groundwaters has increased from ten percent to as much as eighty percent in some situations (George et al., 2001). The assumption of collective community action loses its reality somewhere along this sequence. (Incidentally, I am an ardent advocate of tree planting and believe that in-stream water quality will be considerably improved by restoring riparian vegetation, but re-vegetating large proportions of agricultural or urban catchments to control salinity is not possible with current perennial plant options because of their lack of profitability in most areas.)

Catchment restoration requirements differ from catchments where saline water quality is the prime criterion (e.g. the Murray-Darling, the Collie, the Denmark) to those where the preservation of agricultural land is the main criterion. Bathgate and Pannell (2001) demonstrated that the benefits from preventing salinisation of farm land are unlikely to be sufficient to prompt farmers to undertake revegetation with perennials, unless those perennials are competitive in profitability with traditional land uses, which is currently generally only true on a scale that is insufficient to prevent offsite impacts from salinity (Kingwell, et al. 2003).

And it is important to realise that farmers who only have high ground have no incentive to revegetate, unless the introduced land use is more profitable than their current enterprise. To date, lowland farmers have seldom attempted to sue their high ground neighbours for salinity damages. (And if they did, what price ‘community’?)

The C-ICM body is never the final decision making authority

Most important land use decisions are in the hands of local and or state government departments, including planning, environment and river control departments. The best position that any C-ICM has achieved in Australia has been to be consulted on decisions relating to land use, especially on floodplains (e.g. Victorian CMAs in relation to some issues). So C-ICM bodies are left trying to influence important decisions solely by persuasion. It is little wonder that they are not more effective.

C-ICM threatens to introduce a fourth tier of government

There have been many attempts to form a fourth tier of government, possibly starting with the Department of Urban and Regional Development in the Whitlam Labor Government of 1972-5. So far all attempts have failed. This latest attempt through the NHT and NAPSWQ is also likely to fail, because the level above (state) and the level below (local) are actively opposed.

In any case, although there is often benefit from linking groups of councils into regional organisations, there is little overriding benefit for council boundaries to be based on catchments, since catchments are usually not natural human geographical boundaries. One only has to look at a geographical map of Sydney to see how ridiculous catchment boundaries would be administratively, since Bondi Junction, Chatswood and Hurstville sit on catchment boundaries. Equally about one half of Western Australia has no meaningful drainage boundaries at all!

C-ICM requires a large amount of capacity building

The community can always do with more capacity to deal with difficult and intractable problems, like drug dependence, incurable illness, grieving, and stolen generations. ICM is notable as one area where there is a constant outcry for more capacity building. Why is this so? It seems as though we have come to believe that if we have enough community capacity, then we will be able to solve catchment issues. From where does this belief spring? What is the basis of the belief? How will we know when we have enough community capacity? What is an appropriate measure of community capacity? When do we decide that this approach to a particular problem is working, or will never work?

From Funnell (1998) we learn that the process of successfully devolving to the community the tasks previously managed by government is going to require a considerable increase in capacity building over that which has been delivered to date.
“Government use of communities has become increasingly recognised as a legitimate and potentially more effective and efficient means of designing and delivering services and other government initiatives. Use of communities has been part of a re-orientation from the welfare state to the primacy of self-help, a change in the role of government from rowing to steering, and a move to smaller and leaner government.” (Funnell, 1998)

To me the import of Funnell’s paper is that instead of training a few to be responsible and accountable bureaucrats, we now have to train everyone to be responsible and accountable amateur bureaucrats. We might have hoped to save the resources that would have been spent employing bureaucrats to better management of the resources by the community, but instead we see bureaucrats being assigned to audit local communities to determine how well the delegation of their work has been performed.

I would stress that I support the doctrine of self-help. I pursue the containment of Australia’s increasing human population through Sustainable Population Australia; I have been both WA Chairman and National President of Greening Australia, Secretary of the Gordon’s Bay Volunteer Bush Regeneration Project, an office bearer in the Conservation Council of WA and the Australian Conservation Foundation. My point is that C-ICM is not an effective form of self-help, either for the catchment community or for the broader community. We need to carefully examine the history of C-ICM in enough of the various catchments where it is being tried to determine the answers to the above questions.

C-ICM spreads funds “like vegemite across the landscape”

The attraction to governments of C-ICM partly springs from the ideology of Small Government, though this ideology is often contested when problems (like drought relief) require responses on the scale of a Big Government. In reality, much practical action is the same under either ideology. In the revolt against Big Government, ‘the Community’ stood for action that would be responsive to, and not override, local needs. It also stood for ‘put your effort where your mouth is’ over ‘someone should do something about it’. But under the Small Government rubric, ‘Community-based action’ is often a euphemism for unloading responsibilities. It sometimes appears to be a convenient way to distract activists and to provide enough oil to squeaky wheels to suppress the squeak, even if the machine still does not work. Is this a fraud or a trick, or the natural consequence of a realistic view of social resources? I am deeply conscious of the fact that squeaky wheels get the most attention. As I am quoted in Frost et al. (2001): “The process of allocation by using local, regional, state and national assessment panels means that whoever is at the table has determined the allocation of funds and the money has been spread ‘like vegemite’ across the landscape.”

Conclusions about C-ICM

Rule 1: To date community integrated catchment plans have failed to improve in-stream salinity. Success has occurred only via government intervention in land use (by acquisition or regulation) or in one case (the Denmark River) by un-managed extensive commercial tree planting.

Rule 2: So far, the only way that water quality management has been successfully pursued has been by retention of native vegetation by government agencies, the allocation of ‘environmental flows’, drainage, pumping, and very extensive tree planting in a very small number of catchments (e.g. the Collie and the Denmark).”

C-ICM makes excessive claims for the primacy of the catchment and the community in it. The direct effect of the pursuit of C-ICM is that efficient, smaller interventions will be overlooked and more funds will be spent on planning catchment-wide schemes that will actually be less effective in many cases.

What is C-ICM actually doing?

In the days of Big Government, ICM was conceived as a technical activity, capable of being improved by better data and better analysis. In the 1970s the same ‘systems analysis’ that took men to the moon by ‘integrating’ myriad technical issues, would ‘integrate’ the issues to be found in catchment planning and improve resource management outcomes [6]. Over time, this promise has faded, until ‘integration’ means little more in practice than that representatives of different issues should meet and talk, and be assured that all their concerns will at least be mentioned in a planning document [7]. However, the feeling persists that ‘integration’ should mean a higher form of social organization than just managing the conflict between interest groups, even where this higher form cannot be clearly specified.

It could be that there is something going on under the cover of C-ICM and associated Landcare groups besides attempts to focus on biophysical problems. As an example, in the Review and Renewal of the Corangamite Catchment Management Strategy, considerable attention was focussed on community ownership, as is required by NAPSWQ, with two rounds of seven workshops across the catchments in the Corangamite Catchment Management Authority (CCMA) region. The latest draft of the strategy (Corangamite Catchment Management Authority, 2002) lists the following as its “Vision” (p2):

• A healthy environment;
• Economic use of natural resources;
• A smaller footprint (less use of natural resources);
• A planned landscape;
• Cohesive, innovative communities; and
• Partnership between community and government [8].

This list contains perhaps three items for which the catchment is relevant; but all are societal goals that cannot be delivered by the CCMA, and not easily by any other current institution. What other institutions might conduct similar goal setting workshops? Local governments? State departments? Branches of political parties? Are these social activities an important part of catchment management, even though we hold less and less faith in the voluntary resolution of catchment problems? Is C-ICM being subsumed by societal idealists? Is C-ICM a new social movement, or even a new religion?

Faced with this “Vision” what might the Corangamite community do to achieve these goals? Firstly individual citizens and particularly landholders may change their behaviour or enterprise mix, to derive win-win solutions to catchment problems (or even lose-win solutions, though these are unlikely to last). Secondly these same citizens may elect councillors to local government with a more integrated approach to land use, which is reflected in changes to land use controls within the local government area. These local governments may address problems like “a healthy environment” and “a planned landscape” above. Thirdly these electors and others may combine to elect state and federal legislatures that provide the authority to raise funds either within the catchment, or nationwide to rectify problems like “economic use of natural resources”, “a smaller footprint” and “cohesive, innovative communities”, though I would not expect this to happen soon. Whether these activities are economically beneficial or not is not part of this argument.

These three pathways are the utilitarian ones. There is a fourth. It is followed by citizens who believe in the self-evident goodness of a community whose members are more deeply and consciously involved in mutual development. This belief is held in some cases with almost religious fervour. These citizens, we suspect, are probably among those who were initially attracted to the Corangamite community consultations mentioned above in the hope that ‘integration’ was a ‘better way’ of doing things.
All evangelical groups hold meetings to make conversions and to raise the belief and performance of converts (see, for example, Pannell, 2003). This seems to be the case for recent meetings of those that prepare catchment management plans as much as it is the case with evangelistic religions. They have been encouraged by NAPSWQ and well serviced by a number of facilitators.
Governments pay for search conferences, voluntary organisations and (voluntary) lobbying activities across many issues from conservation to health, and from safety to sustainability. So there is no fundamental reason why governments should not use NAPSWQ funds and C-ICM groups to canvass issues like “economic use of natural resources”, “a smaller footprint” and “cohesive, innovative communities”, except that these expenditures are unlikely to result in beneficial catchment outcomes, and perhaps that some of these activities duplicate other levels of government.

Documenting all these ideas adds a considerable number of pages to regional catchment strategy documents, and keeps a number of facilitators and communicators in paid work. But most of the additional pages are flim-flam that distracts attention. Raising all these issues within the context of ICM lowers the efficiency of ICM and the likelihood that eventually the catchment management body will be able to clearly see through to desirable and achievable catchment objectives. The allocation of funds to resolve natural resource problems is a resource allocation problem, of the type very familiar to economists. Somehow the few economists who have been employed have become marginalised by the joint efforts of those responsible for spreading the vegemite and the facilitators who have confused the community by raising non-catchment issues.

In some cases of catchment management, involving the catchment community has it’s clear and direct downside. In the case of the Collie Catchment, when the ‘recovery team’ was formed it developed a set of guiding principles, which included: “ensure that no landowner will be forced to sell his/her land” (an activity that happened in the previous round). It also specified a set of objectives which included:

• maintain viable communities in the catchment, with a diversity of land uses, businesses and employment opportunities;

• integrate the goals and responsibilities of other community and industry groups;

• ensure that land use changes for salinity management retain an attractive landscape where people enjoy working and living;

• increase employment opportunities.

All these objectives are likely to constrain the salinity management plan for the catchment, and in selecting that plan, such constraints are either redundant, or reduce the value of the optimum. So in this case and probably most, involvement of the community costs the government more money both in terms of the cost of planning and the solution adopted.

The upside of community involvement is that acceptance of any implemented solution is likely to be increased. (In the case of the Collie -- always a marginal state seat, currently held by Labor with 39 votes -- the community could easily delay or increase the cost of implementation using political weapons.)

What can be done to improve catchment management?

It is easy enough to call for a more ‘balanced’ position between Small and Big government than the C-ICM position. In fact the preceding sections have, in the search for balance, opened up more problems of an organizational kind.

Examples that might be copied elsewhere

Australia is large enough to have examples of how most processes, including ICM, can be improved.

The Upper South East of South Australia

The Upper South East of South Australia has a problem that excess water and salt is delivered to the lower parts of the landscape, and causing damage to both valuable wetlands and agricultural land. Various regional bodies have examined these problems over a number of years. The now half-completed drainage scheme diverts the excess water to the sea by drainage channels, whilst at the same time appropriately providing fresh and saline water to the wetlands. Johnson and Van Der Wielen (2002) provide a very interesting account of progress to date. The important points to note are:

• After considerable economic calculations and negotiations a cost sharing arrangement, based on the national and international importance of the wetlands, of 37.5% Commonwealth, 37.5% State Government and 25% local community was agreed;

• Managing political, community and other pressures was facilitated by spending time and effort preparing a well documented business case and project plan; and

• Various “guiding principles” were followed (a formalised project management system; persistence; institutional flexibility; informative and information rich institutions; public investment to support structural adjustment; balancing social, economic and environmental needs; searching for innovative solutions; adequate monitoring and evaluation; learning to live with degradation; learning from successes and mistakes).

The Collie in Western Australia

The Wellington Dam on the Collie River was constructed in 1933 with a catchment of 2,823 km2. Since 1943 government officers have been concerned over the increasing salinity of the dam. The release of Crown land for agriculture ceased in 1961. Clearing legislation on private land was introduced in 1976. A second dam within the Collie Catchment, the Harris, was constructed in 1988 to supply country areas. A condition for the Harris Dam construction was that the water in the Wellington Dam be made potable. By 1995, through compulsory repurchase, swapping and realignment of farm boundaries 67.4 km2 of Government-owned land and 43 km2 of private land had been reforested. Another 88 km2 are planned to be replanted.

The WA Water and Rivers Commission (WRC) established a Collie Salinity Recovery Team. In 2001 WRC released a Salinity Situation Statement (Mauger et al., 2001). A range of options to address the target was then developed, quantified and costed. In summary the costs [9] are:

• Diversion into mining voids within the catchment $13M

• Full diversion of saline headwaters $158M

• A combination of pumps and trees $65M

• Diversion and pumps $124M

• Upland trees $32M

Note that, with the exception of diversion into mining voids [10], the least expensive options contravene the guiding principle that “ensure that no landowner will be forced to sell his/her land”. I am sure that the Collie Recovery Team would reiterate all the lessons from the Upper South East of South Australia. The additional salient points from this catchment planning activity are that

• the problems of the catchment have been under investigation and implementation for the last fifty years and will be for at least the next thirty years;

• public consultation was successful because it was directed to finding solutions for the catchment, not listing all the concerns of the local community, and

• consultation was established when adequate studies had been performed to know what options were possible, or to be able to calculate the consequences of various ideas that were brought forward.
  This last point is particularly important, and in stark contrast to the situation in C-ICM as encouraged and supported by the NAPSWQ and NHT.

Involving the catchment community to achieve community ownership has thrown a significant number of babies (including the simpler objectives, as well as the rating, zoning and compulsory acquisition powers that were used in the past) out with the bathwater of government control.

A return to times past – The interdepartmental committee

As a consequence of the devolution of responsibilities from government to the people, one of the big losses is the importance and utility of government committees, which have played a major part protecting important catchments. These committees, in WA particularly the “Purity of Water Committee” (Samuel, 1972) formed at the direction of the Minister for Works in September 1925, as well as the various committees established in the 1970s to examine the effect of land use, particularly bauxite mining, in the Darling Range, have been useful in identifying a number of catchment problems and enforcing catchment controls without very much public input, or even much government input. Often they continue, but their voice is muted behind all the public debate and rhetoric supporting C-ICM.

Government committees are particularly useful when Ministers need to be advised of the benefits and costs of alternatives, particularly when these alternatives are going to result in gainers and losers who will be vociferous in pursuing their personal interests. Government committees are also better at the assessment of unpopular actions, the sort of actions that appear to be inevitable if catchment management in saline catchments is to be more rationally approached and achievements delivered.
Why and when did we lose faith in interdepartmental committees (IDCs)? They are now associated with the ‘bad’ and unresponsive past of Big Government. There is more to this than mere pendulum-swings of fashion. The IDC did not generally see its role as achieving local ownership of local programs: sometimes it was more or less a high-minded conspiracy against ‘narrow sectional interest’. But the IDC also stood for the chance that government might make an honest effort to attack a large problem that only Big Government could tackle.

What should governments do about C-ICM?

Quite clearly, the Commonwealth Government’s approach to natural resource management requires considerable review and reorganisation. Especially in catchment planning, the process of community involvement has gone off the rails by casting the issues to be addressed far too widely. The whole process of community involvement seems to have been hijacked by facilitators who have broadened the scope of consultation well away from catchment issues to encompass most, if not all, of the problems of rural society. Catchment planning needs to be brought back to proposing and examining alternative ways of achieving catchment objectives, then assessing these alternatives and proposing the best as investments for community and government funding. The community contribution component has been badly undermined by the Victorian Government’s reversal of the CMAs ability to impose levies.

There appears to be a considerable amount of work to be done by economists to reassert their status in catchment planning activities. When some accounting of costs and benefits has been performed, the figures used have not been full social benefit-cost analyses. Indeed, most are like the Collie, where direct costs and some simple budgets are considered adequate by both the government and the recovery team. Where economists have been used, as in the case of the Corangamite Draft Regional Catchment Strategy, the investment framework and analysis is briefly described in five pages in a 171 page document.

To achieve successful outcomes it may also be necessary to withdraw from the current level of community involvement and reassert government powers of rating, zoning and compulsory acquisition to resolve many of the problems of catchment management. All this implies a return to bigger government.

So what should a regional catchment strategist servicing a C-ICM group do?

While NAPSWQ continues to exist then there will either be actual or promised funds to be allocated. Are there approaches that should result in more useful plans? Spending time and resources on public consultation and search conferences should not be part of this agenda, at least until some options can be put on the table. A regional catchment strategist well aware of all the limitations of C-ICM, might propose the following actions to obtain NAPSWQ funds, especially for planning allocations:

• First determine whether the catchment has genuinely catchment-sized problems that are also genuinely community-sized issues (flooding as a consequence of increasingly barren saline areas is an example). It might also be possible to identify hotspots within the catchment for special treatment.

• Having listed these issues, determine what alternatives there are to resolving these problems (e.g. flood plain zoning, revegetation, engineering works, etc.)

• Take these issues to the affected public to have them consider how important they are and what are the triple bottom line consequences of these issues. “The affected public” are not necessarily landowners within the catchment. “The affected public” are more likely to be downstream conservationists and water users.

• Do the necessary investigations to better quantify the more reasonable of these alternatives (e.g. flood and contour mapping, etc.)

• Do a Triple Bottom Line assessment of these alternatives, including a benefit-cost analysis.

• Take these results back to the affected public to negotiate a preliminary cost-sharing arrangement between the gainers and the losers.

• Take the results to government to determine what position it will take by legislation and/or the provision of funds.
  In general, these suggestions say that the position of the community in the process is to be bounded, and clearly specified in advance, to avoid loss of focus.

Acknowledgements

This paper has been considerably improved by interactions with Dr Duncan Macpherson, Mr John Platt and Mr Tim Sparks. It has got this far as a consequence of Associate Professor David Pannell’s enthusiastic support.

References

Bathgate, A. and Pannell, D.J. (2002). Economics of deep-rooted perennials in Western Australia, Agricultural Water Management 53: 117-132.

Bennett, D. (2002). Is there an economic benefit to planting trees by saving downstream assets? Paper in support of the WA State Sustainability Strategy see
http://www.sustainability.dpc.wa.gov.au/BGPapers/DavidBennettCatchmentsAndTreesReport.pdf

Bleazby, R. (1917). Railway water-supplies in Western Australia: difficulties caused by salt in soil, Proc. Inst. Civil Engineers 203: 394-400.

Bradby, K. (1994). Catchment repair – Nett progress or neat progress? Paper to the South Coast LCDC Conference, Albany

Frost F., Hamilton, B., Lloyd, M. and Pannell D. (2001). Salinity: A New Balance, The report of the Salinity Taskforce established to review salinity management in Western Australia, Perth.

Funnell, S. (1998). Building the capacity of communities as partners with government: challenges for a small and lean government, The Future Challenges Seminar Series of The Department of Finance and Administration.

George, R., Clark, C.J. and Hatton, T. (2001). Computer-modelled groundwater response to recharge management for dryland salinity control in Western Australia, Advances in Environmental Monitoring and Modelling 2: 3–35. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/advances

Johnson, A. and Van Der Wielen, M. (2002). The Drain Brains: Getting serious about fixing the environment in the Upper South East, Presented at Getting it Right, 11-12 March 2002, Adelaide. http://www.plevin.on.net/GIR/

Kingwell, R., Hajkowicz, S., Young, J., Patton, D., Trapnell, L., Edward, A., Krause, M. and Bathgate, A., (2003). Economic Evaluation of Salinity Management Options in Cropping Regions of Australia, Grains Research and Development Corporation, Canberra.

Mauger, G.W., Bari, M., Boniecka, L., Dixon, R.N.M., Dogramaci, S.S. and Platt, J. (2001). Salinity Situation Statement – Collie River, Water & Rivers Commission Report No WRT 29.

Moore, D.R. (1943) Letter from District Field Officer of the Forests Department at Collie to R.J. Dumas Engineer-in-Chief - Battye ACC 1545/AN 82/3 ARC 76 on PWWS 1098/41.

NLWRA (2003) Australian Natural Resources Atlas - Adjustment Agricultural Structure - Overview
Pannell, D.J. (2002). Managing salinity with markets, plants and engineering: How do we move policy forward? Transcript of presentation to Select Committee on Salinity Seminar: "Investing in Solutions to Salinity" at Parliament House, Sydney, Monday 8 April 2002, SEA Working Paper 02/01, School of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Western Australia.
http://www.general.uwa.edu.au/u/dpannell/dpap0201.htm

Pannell, D.J. (2003). Effectively communicating economics to policy makers, Invited paper presented at the 47th Annual Conference of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, Fremantle, Western Australia, 12-14 February 2003.

Samuel, L.W. (1972). Note on ‘Committee Charter’ to Chairman Purity of Water Committee, dated 19 May 1972.

Watson, A. (2001). Dear taxpayer, send money, Connections: Farm, Food and Resource Issues 1: 26-29. http://www.agrifood.info/Connections/2001_1/watson.htm

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Footnotes

1 See http://www.sca.nsw.gov.au/
2 See http://www.hcmt.org.au/
3 See http://www.mdbc.gov.au/
4 See http://www.napswq.gov.au/publications/vital_resources.html
5 (see http://www.ea.gov.au/biodiversity/publications/series/paper10/pubs/part1-approach.pdf).
6 Some of John Burton’s early papers show some of this aspiration. I was co-author of a book “On Rational Grounds: Systems Analysis in Catchment Land Use Planning” Bennett, D and Thoms, JF, Elsevier 1982.
7 This sort of activity is also happening in Western Australia in response to the State’s Draft Sustainability Strategy.
8 “Manage your own waste” was deleted from an earlier draft.
9 Costs were defined as the physical cost of the engineering works plus the discounted net present value of the plantation activities over the next twenty years.
10 This was an idea developed by the local community which includes a couple of coal mining companies, which illustrates how local knowledge can be harnessed to come up with innovative solutions.

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Citation: Bennett, D. (2003) Rethinking community-based integrated catchment management. Paper presented at the 47th Annual Conference of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, Fremantle, Western Australia, February 11th to 14th 2003.