Breaking through the Equity Barrier in Environmental Policy

Citation

Land & Water Australia. 2009. Breaking through the Equity Barrier in Environmental Policy. [Online] (Updated June 24th, 2009)
Available at: http://lwa.gov.au/node/3133 [Accessed Sunday 21st of March 2010 08:39:35 PM ].

The main hypothesis underlying this study was that judgments of equity or fairness are sensitive to context, but not in a random way. We designed a two-pronged approach for equity judgments regarding water allocation policies in Western Australia.

The first used surveys of urban and rural populations to explore equity judgments in scheme water and bore water management policies; the second will be using controlled laboratory experiments to systematically control for the factors which the surveys have revealed as important. We report on the first part of the study, pending the experimental results.

Water policies and their relationship to issues of equity or fairness were first reviewed in an international context, to reveal that equity and fairness are absolutely crucial criteria that must be dealt with properly, to avoid the risk of ‘water wars’, as evidenced in several parts of the world today. In order to be able to resolve issues of equity and fairness, however, a full reckoning of the costs and benefits for all parties involved is necessary. We therefore reviewed the literature on full resource accounting, which takes into account not only the visible financial costs, but also the invisible social and environmental costs. We then considered how these issues have been dealt with in Australia by reviewing the recent efforts to reform water policies. This set the scene for our case studies in south-western W.A., which revolved around the issue of water restrictions and water pricing, both for scheme water and bore water. We reviewed the national and local media as well as relevant documentation by the W.A. Water Corporation, which allowed us to design our surveys in terms relevant to both urban and rural respondents.

Project Objectives

Explore and demonstrate a new method to account for equity/fairness concerns in environmental policies.
Explore and demonstrate the practical value of this method on a case study.
Break through a longstanding analytical barrier regarding equity as a criterion in policy.
Show how efficiency and equity criteria in policy can be brought together unambiguously.

The key findings from the two surveys carried out are the following:

There is remarkable consistency in judgments of equity or fairness across all sectors of the population, at least when issues of water allocation or pricing are at stake.
The study revealed a remarkable fact: the relative proportion of respondents with positive as opposed to negative attitudes to the different fairness/equity criteria remained mostly unchanged between urban vs. country and student vs. non-student populations and between scheme vs. bore water policies. The significance of this (approximate) invariance for policy purposes will need to be better understood.
Variations in judgments of equity or fairness do exist, but they are of intensity or degree rather than kind. Two factors appear as having most influence: age and income. Remarkably, level of education appears to have no influence at all.
The stability of the structure of equity judgments revealed by the surveys supports our hypothesis, that influences are far from being random; rather, they operate in a very structured way. This is useful information for predicting policy acceptability.
Such structural stability needs, however, to be put to the test, something surveys cannot do. This is what the experiments are planned to do.
To the extent that in most respects our samples are sufficiently representative of the general population, our results can be extrapolated. Further statistical tests need to be carried out, however, before we know to what extent this can be safely done.
Two-thirds of the 331 survey respondents declared their interest in participating in further research.

From the results of this scoping study it now appears that equity/fairness issues will be able to be put on an equal footing with economic efficiency in policy design and implementation, thereby greatly enhancing the likelihood of policy acceptance. With some more work, policy makers will be better able to predict the social acceptability of their policies, and adjust them accordingly.

Publications and Resources

Title	Product Type
Looking into equity in environmental decisions for policy makers	Fact Sheet
Breaking through the equity barrier in environmental policy	Report Final Report