The Murray-Darling Basin comprises over 1 million km2; it lies within four states and one territory; and over 12, 800 GL of irrigation water is used to produce over 40% of the nation's gross value of agricultural production. This production is used by a diverse collection of some-times mutually...

The purpose of this article is to provide a framework for discussion of the current policy issues surrounding management of the Great Artesian Basin, with reference to the historical development of existing legislation and institutions. Of particular interest is the applicability of lessons...

The construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme in the 1960s resulted in the diversion of 99% of the Snowy River’s natural flow into the Murray and Murrumbidgee river systems. In 2000, the NSW, Victorian and Commonwealth governments agreed to restore between 21 per cent and...

Management of the Murray-Darling river system involves a large number of users with imprecisely defined rights, and an aggregate rate of resource use that is environmentally unsustainable. One possible policy response is to make formal or informal contracts with users, under which users receive...

Among the many environmental problems facing Australia, the problems of managing the Murray-Darling Basin and of responding to climate change are notable for their complexity, intractability and for the wide range of people and regions affected. Consideration of policy successes and failures in...

The relative merits of different property right systems to allocate water among different extractive uses where variability of supply is important are evaluated. Three systems of property rights are considered. In the first, variable supply is dealt with through the use of water rights defined...

We consider conditions under which the representation of the world available to a boundedly rational decision-maker, whose awareness in- creases over time, constitutes an adequate `small world' (in the sense of Savage 1954) for the assessment of a given decision. Equivalently, we consider...

This paper describes experiences in the development and testing of three distinct financial models to support farm forestry decisions involving non-traditional tree species in northern Australia and in the Philippines. A variety of options were examined with respect to model design, yield...

We formulate a dynamic framework for an individual decision-maker within which discovery of previously unconsidered propositions is possible. Using a standard game-theoretic representation of the state space as a tree structure generated by the actions of agents (including acts of nature), we...