As Australia begins to implement the National Water Initiative, there are lessons to be learned from past experience in rural adjustment and rural assistance schemes. The experience is rich and the messages powerful. Government intervention in the process of adjustment and change can impede,...

Over-allocation of irrigation water has led to widespread environmental degradation in the Murray-Darling Basin, prompting discussions of the water efficiency performance of irrigated industries, particularly cotton. There is increasing pressure for irrigators to adopt water efficient practices...

The National Water Initiative and earlier water reforms have committed Australian governments to redressing environmental degradation caused by excessive extraction from rivers and groundwater systems. To date, the states, territories and commonwealth have identified a range of alternatives for...

The Australian National Water Initiative (NWI) builds on the foundations of earlier water reforms, attempts to correct earlier errors in both policy and its implementation, and seeks to better define some of the policy aims with the benefit of hindsight. However, despite the deliberate effort to...

This paper builds a model determining optimal capacities of diversion dams or water transfer projects. The model incorporates stochastic inflows to the dams and the role of the dam capacity in reducing overflows, and gives a closed-form expression of the marginal benefit of capacities....

Decisions regarding the use of natural resources frequently involve multiple options. Assessing each of the available options can be a time consuming and costly process where non-market environmental values relating to the options are to be estimated. Choice Modelling (CM) offers the potential...

Perceptions of a salinity ‘crisis’ in Australia around 2000 resulted in the establishment of a major national program that aimed to prevent, stabilize, and reverse trends in salinity. The National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality allocated A$1.4 billion of public funds to 1700...

In the past decade, market based instruments (MBIs) have become more frequently applied for natural resource and environmental management purposes. MBIs comprise a range of instruments used to provide economic incentives/disincentives (e.g. by altering market prices, setting a cap or altering...

Appropriate management and policy responses for dryland salinity vary depending on biophysical and socio-economic conditions, and on the resources in question (water resources, biodiversity, infrastructure, agricultural land, salt-affected land). In this paper we present a framework for...

The viability of irrigated systems in Southern Europe is closely linked to efficient institutional settings and water-allocation mechanisms. A significant, although not widely used, mechanism for water allocation is an intra-sectorial water market. The objective of this paper is to evaluate to...