Rewards for providing environmental services — Where indigenous Australians' and western perspectives collide

Kerstin K. Zander, Desleigh R. Dunnett, Christine Brown, Otto Campion and Stephen T. Garnett

Ecological Economics, 2013, vol. 87, issue C, 145-154

Abstract: Rewards for environmental service provision, couched under market-based instruments, are widely touted in Australia as a means of improving natural resource management while empowering indigenous people. We document here the views of indigenous Australians in a community in Arnhem Land about their motivations for, and ways to provide, such services. Most respondents (93%) said that they ‘look after country’ to fulfil cultural responsibilities. Natural resource management, they said, should be carried out communally, primarily under the direction of elders and family. Sixty percent of respondents preferred direct payments such as cash or salaried remuneration like that commonly offered in return for ranger-like activities such as feral animal/weed control, coastal surveillance and prescribed burning. Some (14%) either did not want or did not need rewards for environmental service provision. Others (19%) preferred rewards in a form that benefited their community or family rather than themselves as individuals. There was agreement that outcomes should be monitored, consistent with the principle that reward payments should be conditional on performance. We suggest that a reward system that is too narrowly defined could thwart the potential for win-win outcomes from indigenous incentive-based natural resource management but that their articulation could allow solutions to be negotiated.

Keywords: Cultural responsibilities; Feral animals; Fire management; Indigenous land management; Maningrida; North Australia, performance payments; PES (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800913000074
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:87:y:2013:i:c:p:145-154

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.12.029

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().