Australia's National Approach to 'Ecologically Sustainable Development': Success in Principle, Failure in Policy, Still in Prospect

Burnett, Peter

doi:10.25911/5c78fc5451deb

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…In the first instance, the Act has multiple objects, which include (but are not limited to) the protection of the environment, and the promotion of a co-operative approach to environmental protection and management. Simultaneously, the Act promotes ecologically sustainable development (ESD), including consideration of intergenerational equity and the precautionary principle (Burnett, 2018;Dovers, 2013;Macintosh, 2015). To achieve these objects, the Act (among others) limits the federal government's involvement to 'matters of national environmental significance' (MNES, or 'protected matter') and emphasises that the Commonwealth environmental assessment and approval process be 'efficient and timely'.…”

Section: Biodiversity Offset Policy Under the Epbc Act 1999mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Crucially, ambiguity must be reduced at the political level for environmental policy to be effective, otherwise 'street-level' bureaucrats will continue to be paralysed by values conflict and reach for coping strategies that are ultimately maladaptive for meeting policy goals. Reforms that eliminate or phase out subsidies that harm biodiversity (Dempsey et al, 2020), increase positive investment in biodiversity conservation (Samuel, 2020;Wintle et al, 2019), and embed an explicit 'strong sustainability' definition of ESD within the EPBC Act (Macintosh, 2015) and its biodiversity offset policy would all contribute to ensuring that socioeconomic development occurs within ecological constraints (Burnett, 2018;Reynolds, 2023). With greater clarity of public values in the political realm, administrators could then legitimately adopt unambiguous decision rules which sequence the consideration of environmental values prior to other factors under the EPBC Act, which would further reduce the scope for backloading and its associated environmental and accountability risks.…”

Section: Recommendations For Future Research and Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Backloading to extinction: Coping with values conflict in the administration of Australia's federal biodiversity offset policy

Evans

2023

Aust J Public Adm

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Policy-makers are frequently required to consider and manage conflicting public values. An example of this in the environmental domain is biodiversity offset policy, which governments worldwide have adopted as a mechanism to balance environmental protection with socio-economic development. However, little work has examined administrative practices underpinning biodiversity offset policy implementation, and how the adoption of coping strategies to manage value conflicts may influence resulting policy outcomes. This study fills this research gap using a case study of Australia's federal biodiversity offset policy under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999.Using data from 13 interviews of federal policy administrators, I show that the introduction of a new policy in 2012 enabled a shift from the use of precedent to a technical approach for setting offset requirements under the EPBC Act. Yet, multiple sources of policy ambiguity remain, and administrators have adopted post-approval condition-setting, or 'backloading'-a form of cycling, facilitated by structural separation-to defer detailedThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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Section: Biodiversity Offset Policy Under the Epbc Act 1999mentioning

confidence: 99%