“Lamicare in the Balance”: Government Roles and Policy Issues in Sustaining Rural Environments

Abstract

The encouragement and limited support of Landcare groups has been the predominant government response to general social concern about degrading rural landscapes in Australia. We argue that this Landcare policy reflects modern forms of governance that attempt to devolve responsibility for rural environments to the local level, limit State fiscal commitments and “co-ordinate” farmers' choices via the market. Encouraging local rural participation has been very successful, but has had “unintended” effects which tend to favour particular groups of farmers. Deregulatory economic policies have increased risk for many farmers which can mitigate against adoption of sustainable practices. Local participatory and deregulatory policies, aimed at encouraging “self-help”, cannot deal with the wider spatial and temporal dimensions of rural environments. A lack of government support for monitoring, evaluation and regional co-ordination means that these “off-site” problems are unknown and unaccounted for. We conclude by s...