Adaptive or aspirational? Governance of diffuse water pollution affecting Australia’s Great Barrier Reef

ABSTRACT

The natural attributes of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a UNESCO world heritage site listed for its natural beauty and biological diversity, are rapidly declining due to major threats from diffuse water pollution and climate change. The environmental, social, political and legal conditions that have enabled or blocked successful management of diffuse water pollution are analyzed. We find that the management approach has transitioned towards resilience-focused adaptive management of impacts from outside the marine park. Despite key enablers of adaptive governance, deep-seated political ideology is a major barrier to transformational adaptive governance to improve reef water quality.

KEYWORDS:

• Water quality
• diffuse water pollution
• resilience
• adaptive governance
• regulation
• Great Barrier Reef

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There are three levels of government in Australia: federal (Commonwealth), state and local. The Commonwealth Constitution of 1901 gives authority over land and water within state boundaries to state government (Kildea & Williams, 2010; Horne, 2017).

2. These are the National Water Quality Management Strategy, which gives guidelines for fresh and marine water quality, and the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. The latter ran from 2000 to 2008 before becoming the Caring for our Country initiative, one arm of which extended to the Reef (Waschka & Gardner, 2016).