In Australia, the current system and pattern of use and management of our natural resources has developed over a long period during times when people commonly considered these resources as largely unlimited in terms of capacity for productive use and when beliefs in people’s rights to use their land as they wished were particularly dominant (e.g. Cocks 1992). For example Bates (2003) argues:
The governmental approach to natural resource management has had to be applied in the context of a social system that hitherto placed few restrictions on the exploitation of natural resources by private owners. The common law effectively allowed landowners to do what they wished with their land and its resources, subject only to the right of other landowners not to be unreasonably interfered with by such use … It remains true that the most significant environmental problems facing Australia today have also proved to be the hardest for governments to tackle because they force regulators to confront the traditional rights of private landowners … Attempts to curb degradation and destruction of natural resources on private land however; for example, clearance of native vegetation and forests, land degradation and loss of biodiversity in general, have historically proved difficult to introduce, and have been inadequate in their coverage, implementation and enforcement. Water and fisheries reform have also had to grapple with the difficulties inherent in modifying or removing entitlements that over the years have come to be regarded as de facto property rights (p.279-280).
Institutional arrangements for managing our natural resources traditionally involve numerous individual, single-function federal and state agencies, each pursuing its own legal mandate through developing and implementing policy dominantly focused on single issues (such as sustainable production, water supply or nature conservation). Over some period of time, this system developed numerous natural resource policies and government incentives (e.g. encouraging land clearing for development) which often proved to have conflicting or unintended and environmentally-undesirable effects (e.g. ANAO 1997; The Senate Committee Inquiry 2004).
With growing recognition that the impacts of past resource use policy and practices are becoming socially, economically and environmentally unacceptable, the term ‘natural resource management’ (NRM) emerged in the mid to late 1990s in Australian national and state policy arenas as an integrative and systemic concept to address the complex sustainability issues of our interconnected social and natural systems. In 1999, a federal policy discussion paper on Managing Natural Resources in Rural Australia for a Sustainable Future on developing a national policy for natural resource management defined NRM as ‘protecting, maintaining and enhancing natural resources in rural Australia to provide the basis for sustainable production, healthy ecosystems (including healthy rivers and estuaries) and viable rural communities’ (AFFA 1999, p.1). It also clearly argues that ‘policy approaches for NRM need to be applied in an integrated way across regions and catchments and at the local or farm levels’ (AFFA 1999, p.1).