Agri-political Organizations in Environmental Governance: Representing Farmer Interests in Regional Partnerships

Abstract

Investigations of agri-environmental programmes and their implementation often overlook the contribution of agri-political organizations (APOs). They focus instead upon the experiences of individual farmers, or the potential of farmers to be environmental stewards, the strategies or particular policy instruments employed by governments, or the workings of cooperative planning committees at river basin scales. Over the last decade in Australia, the influence and involvement of APOs in initiatives such as regional natural resource planning and the implementation of water quality policies has increased markedly but has remained largely under-researched. This paper indicates the ways these groups are becoming more embedded in the politics and operation of environmental governance and outlines the new and contested roles these groups are now playing in Australian rural landscapes. Using the case of the ongoing implementation of the Reef Water Quality Protection Plan, the paper explores tensions in the current arrangements and considers implications for ongoing participation of the farming sector in environmental governance. These tensions revolve around challenges to APOs’ traditional dialogic practices; interest-based models of representation; and their capacity to align with and operate within new territorial spaces of policy implementation, such as regions.

Keywords:

• Australia
• agri-political organizations
• regional environmental governance
• water quality
• farmer interest groups

Acknowledgements

Jane Muller, Toni Darbas and Tanya Jakimow provided helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and assistance with access to industry documents and reports. The authors also thank Rachael Eberhard, Allan Dale and Frederieke Kroon for their invitation to participate in the various stakeholder forums in the study. The field component of this research was funded by the Australian Government's Marine and Tropical Sciences Research Facility.

Notes

A NHT was formed in the 1996 and provided over AUS$1 billion to catchment management groups over a five-year period. This was followed by two successive phases of NHT funding 2001–2008— again with billions of dollars being provided. A National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality was also funded within this period and more recently a Caring for Our Country initiative by the incumbent Federal Labor Government promises some AUS 2 billion for on-ground environmental improvements and stewardship payments to primary producers from 2008 until 2013 (Hajkowicz, 2009; Lane et al., 2009). Funding is received by the 56 approved regional NRM bodies whose plans are accredited by federal and state governments.

Following the introduction of the Queensland Environmental Protection Act (1994).

Queensland Vegetation Management Act (1999) and the Queensland Water Act (2000).

The Plan provides for the deployment of new prescriptive regulations if voluntary measures prove insufficiently effective in the assessment of the Queensland State Government. This did, in fact, eventuate in 2009 with the introduction of the Great Barrier Reef Protection Act Amendment Bill (2009).

An Interdepartmental Steering Committee comprising Heads of Agencies from (then) Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, Department of the Environment and Heritage and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and Queensland Government Departments of Natural Resources and Mines; Premier and Cabinet; Primary Industries; and Environmental Protection Agency. This was supported by a small secretariat and a working party of senior government officers as the Intergovernmental Operations Committee.

The allocation of resources reflected the region-oriented, rather than sectoral model of implementation. For the three-year investment period for the Australian Government-funded Reef Rescue programme from 2009/2010 to 2012/2013, the seven regional body entities were allocated AUS47.59M by the Australian Government against industry organizations which received a total of AUS 2.86M to resource their own involvement in programme coordination and delivery.

The first author adopted a position of ‘participant-as-observer’. In this role, the researcher makes explicit the research goals to participants in the forums, and the researcher engages in some level of participation as well as observation. In this way the author would, on occasion, put an open question to a group to seek expansion on a line of argument or to encourage participants to discuss a situation from an alternative position.

This was the Cardwell Shire Floodplain Management Steering Committee with oversight of the development of the Tully-Murray Water Quality Improvement Plan under the Australian Government's Coastal Catchments Initiative. These planning processes made a significant contribution to the setting of water quality targets, the listing of environmental values, identification of pollutant sources and nomination of specific land management practices. These plans formed a specific implementation action under the Reef Plan.

The Industry Reference Group consisted of farming and grazing interests in the Wet Tropics region and was established by Terrain NRM as an advisory committee to their board of directors on issues pertaining to the implementation of sustainable agriculture programmes in the region.