Judith A. Rees

CAN STRATEGIC ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT SUCCEED IN MULTIAGENCY ENVIRONMENTS

While the descriptive and conceptual literature on ecosystem management is, in general, enthusiastic about its potential advantages, there is now a more critical literature that suggests that the long-term gains from ecological management approaches remain uncertain, in a multiagency context. Moreover, relatively little is known about the long-term influences of economic, political, environmental, and organizational change on both the capacity to implement ecological management systems and their ability to deliver sustainable ecosystem benefits. In this paper, an attempt is made to understand how the “character” of stakeholder agencies (i.e., the sets of interagency relationships and what is termed the organizational ecology of interacting agencies) operate to further or frustrate efforts to introduce sustainable ecological management systems. It does so recognizing that all are subject to change, given the dynamics of the political economy in which they operate. The workings of the Forest Improvement Act...

Explaining risk regulation regimes: exploring the 'minimal feasible response' hypothesis

Abstract This paper provides an analytic description of four health-related risk regulation regimes in the UK (governing radon in the home, dangerous dogs outside the home, pesticide residues in food and water, and ambient benzene). It compares observed state activity for information-gathering, standard-setting and behaviour modification or enforcement in those four regimes with what would be expected from the standpoint of a ‘minimal feasible response’ hypothesis. Such a hypothesis assumes state activity will consist of the minimal level of intervention needed to correct specific failures in market or tort-law processes (where the costs of informing oneself about risks or opting out of risks through market or civil law methods are very high). Only one out of the four cases (dogs) fits the minimal feasible response hypothesis (and even that not completely), and observed regimes differ from the minimal feasible response pattern in terms of both greater-than-expected and lesser-than-expected regulation. The...

Profligacy and scarcity: an analysis of water management in Australia

Without denying the physical relaity of water shortages during the 1982 Australia drought, it is argued that some of the difficulties arise not from climatic factors but from the way the water resource is managed. An attempt is made to explain why metropolitan Australia can continue to make profligate use of water, while rural Australia suffers scarcity. The system of administration is considered and the capacity planning and pricing policies of supply authorities analysed. Finally, a call is made for the introduction of an effective integrated management system.

Water demand forecasts and planning margins in South-East England

Rees J. A. and Rees R. (1972) Water demand forecasts and planning margins in South-East England, Reg. Studies 6, 37–48. On the basis of its demand forecasts, the Water Resources Board has derived a set of projections of required expenditure on new supply capacity. In view of the scale and irreversibility of the commitments of land and capital, it is important that an attempt be made to examine the demand forecasts. This study suggests that these forecasts are well above the demand levels which would be expected from the best estimate of past trends. It is clear that unless investment programmes are revised, considerable excess capacity will have been installed by 1985. The cost of this excess capacity could amount to over 30 per cent of the total projected expenditure. It is suggested that the overforecasting is a symptom of a planning structure which is inappropriate not only for forecasting but also for investment appraisal and control.

Natural Resources, Economy and Society

During the 1960s there was a renaissance of public and academic interest in a plethora of natural resource problems. These included the physical scarcity of vital energy and metallic minerals; geopolitical threats to mineral supplies; unequal trading relations between the resource exporters of the South and the importing countries of the North; the deteriorating quality of the environment; the depletion of renewable resources, such as soils, fish and forests; and the potentially disastrous effects of changes in global biogeochemical cycles. Despite the fact that geographers once defined their subject as the study of the relationship between human society and the physical environment, this reawakening of concern over natural resources largely by-passed human geography. The subject was at that time preoccupied to the point of obsession with the quantitative revolution, with the search for spatial order and the development of theoretical models of industrial location, land use patterns, urban hierarchies and transport networks. It was commonly assumed that the location and nature of the resource base were fixed and given; the way in which human societies define resources and give meaning to natural systems was largely ignored and the physical environment vanished behind neat optimising rules for the spacing of economic activities and settlements. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, there was almost total neglect of the critical question of how natural resources, and the wealth or welfare derived from them, are allocated between socio-economic, political and cultural groups over space and time. This neglect was evident at all spatial scales — global, national and local.

Introduction: International Oil Issues and Perspectives

The international oil industry has long commanded public, political and academic attention.In recent years it has been seen as the pivotal force propelling the world into a series of interrelated ‘crises’. Oil scarcity was central to the idea of a ‘World energy crisis’, an idea so generally presented and widely accepted that the concept was seldom seriously appraised. The multinational oil companies, which dominated the international oil business until the late 1960s, were viewed as major contributors to the ‘development crisis’ in some Third World nations. It was a commonly accepted scenario that by exploiting the oil resources and transferring abroad much of the resultant economic rent, the companies were depleting the most valuable capital asset of producer states and thus depriving them of their development potential. Thus the 1973/4 ‘oil crisis’, created when the main producing countries — united in OPEC — unilaterally raised prices by a factor of four, was viewed by many as the dawn of a new international economic order. A dawn greeted with enthusiasm by some as being ‘the point when the Third World countries became aware, not of their rights, but of their power’ (Amin, 1979, p.65). However, no cause for celebration was felt by those who saw the same shift in resource power as a threat to the political security and material prosperity of advanced western nations (US National Commission on Materials Policy, 1973; Bergsten, 1974). Following the 1973/4 and 1979/80 oil price rises, the oil sector has since been held responsible for two further ‘crises’, world economic recession and the Third World Debt crisis, which according to some analysts could, in turn, lead to the breakdown of the international financial system, as defaults cause the collapse of major banks.

The Disciplinary Perspectives

In this chapter an attempt will be made to draw together the threads in the debate by considering the issues raised from the disciplinary perspectives represented at the seminar series. We begin with an economic viewpoint. The marked recent decline in oil prices and the evident disunity of OPEC has naturally led to much discussion of the ‘reassertion’ of the ‘logic of the market’. However, certain care must be taken when the rules for market logic are derived from models of the world economy which assume economic rationality, perfect competition and free markets. Neither individual consumers, industries or financial corporations nor, importantly, their governments, necessarily adhere to the objectives or behavioural norms implied by economic rationality. As Professor Desai himself points out in the messy political economy of the real world oil market ‘economics alone is not enough’