Public policy for biodiversity conservation: evaluating outcomes, opportunities and risks
Date
2017
Authors
Evans, Megan Catherine
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Abstract
The conservation of biodiversity is a daunting and complex public
policy challenge. Over the past three decades, two clear themes
have emerged in conservation science, policy and practice:
greater experimentation with market-based policy instruments
(MBIs); and an increased concern over the effectiveness of
conservation policies. These two themes are interrelated, as a
key driver of the rise in prominence of MBIs has been the promise
of more effective, efficient and equitable conservation than that
which is possible under ‘traditional’ regulatory approaches.
However, scarce evidence is available on the efficacy of
regulatory policies and MBIs alike, and it has been argued that
“better theory, better methods, and better data” are required
if conservation policies are to be more frequently and rigorously
evaluated for effectiveness. This focus on the technical
challenges of policy evaluation is incomplete, as effectiveness
of conservation policy is influenced not only by the choice of
policy instrument or combination thereof, but also the actors
involved, the relevant institutional, social and political
contexts, and decisions made at various stages of the policy
process.
In this thesis, I investigate the challenges and complexities
associated with conservation policy in Australia, an advanced and
politically stable economy. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed
methods approach, I consider regulatory and market-based policy
responses to a major driver of biodiversity loss, deforestation,
and evaluate what outcomes, opportunities and risks these
policies present for conservation. In Chapter Two, I document the
recent shift away from ‘command and control’ policy responses
to deforestation in Australia, and towards self-regulation and
MBIs. Despite this change in policy style, little is known of
their efficacy. In Chapter Three, I use a spatially explicit
bent-cable regression model to evaluate what effect regulatory
policies have had on the rate of deforestation in Queensland,
Australia. I find some evidence of a policy effect after
adjusting for covariates, but extreme variation in regional
deforestation trends reduces this effect at the state level. In
Chapter Four, I present findings which confirm that carbon
farming is economically viable in degraded Queensland
agricultural landscapes under an estimated $5 t CO2e-1 carbon
price. In practice however, large-scale reforestation has not
occurred despite being the ‘rational’ option, in part due to
policy complexity and political uncertainty. In the final three
empirical chapters, I consider challenges in the design,
implementation and evaluation of biodiversity offset policy. In
Chapter Five I describe a mathematical framework used to underpin
the Australian Environmental Offsets Policy, which was designed
to deliver ‘no net loss’ outcomes for protected matters. I
subsequently illustrate in Chapters Six and Seven that
improvements to policy design do not necessarily lead to better
policy outcomes, due to complexities that emerge through policy
implementation in the context of multi-actor, multi-level
environmental governance. I draw on qualitative data from
interviews with key informants to describe potential risks to
biodiversity outcomes under current offset policy settings,
including: ambiguous responsibility for long term security and
management, fragmentation within government departments at the
federal and state levels, and a lack of transparency and public
accountability. I conclude the thesis and provide future research
directions in Chapter Eight.
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Deforestation, evaluation, public policy, biodiversity conservation, environmental governance, market based instruments, environmental regulation, mixed methods, interdisciplinary research
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