
Graham Roy MarshallUniversity of New England | UNE · School of Environmental and Rural Science
Graham Roy Marshall
Ph.D.
About
127
Publications
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Introduction
My research is concerned with the institutional economics of sustainable development in rural settings, and particularly with how different forms of environmental governance (e.g., community-based, polycentric, etc.) affect people's motivations to exercise the citizenship involved in the adaptations and transformations required for social-ecological resilience.
Additional affiliations
July 2020 - April 2022
July 2005 - December 2012
January 2001 - June 2005
Education
January 1997 - December 2001
June 1994 - June 1996
March 1976 - November 1980
Publications
Publications (127)
Motivation plays a powerful role in guiding human decision-making and behaviour, including adaptation to climate change. This study aimed to determine whether community-based governance would increase behavioural support, in the form of donation behaviour, for a climate change adaptation trust fund. A sample of 548 Australians was randomly assigned...
Legitimacy deficits have been identified as central to the ongoing challenges encountered in implementing the policy reforms introduced to reduce the environmental impacts of over-allocating water in the Murray-Darling Basin. In closing the special issue on Building and Maintaining Trust and Legitimacy in Environmental Water Management, this articl...
This chapter is concerned with relationships between governance arrangements and environmental citizenship, and with the challenges of establishing and sustaining governance conducive to this citizenship. The significance of this concern is illustrated by Australian experiences with governance arrangements seeking to promote citizenship among rural...
The first empirical application of an established framework for evaluating the adaptive efficiency of policy and project options — the Institutional Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (ICEA) framework — is documented in this paper. The application involves cost-effectiveness comparison of six projects for environmental water recovery in the Murray-Darling...
This chapter explores how insights from Resilience Thinking (RT) can better inform efforts to reform water policies in directions required for sustainable development. The focus is on the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) in Australia, and particularly on reforms seeking to achieve environmentally sustainable water use. We find that the reform process rem...
Much of humanity has become alienated from the non-human world as an enduring consequence of transformation at the IAD framework's metaconstitutional level of analysis, commencing in sixteenth century western Europe, to a 'disenchanted', anthropocentric worldview rendering this world of only instrumental value to humans. The resulting loss of affin...
Water management in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin is undergoing a highly contested shift from single use management for irrigation, to multiple use management for irrigation and environmental flows. Despite a requirement to ‘take account’ of Indigenous values, multiple use management does not yet include cultural flows – water flows for Aborigin...
Agricultural research for development agencies in sub-Saharan Africa increasingly implements innovation platforms (IPs) to address institutional barriers to innovation in smallholder agriculture. This research aims to understand the activities, actions or arrangements that were mediated by a multilevel set of IPs to sustain the use of livestock fee...
While protected areas are a measure for forest conservation, they pose a number of key challenges to local people’s livelihoods. One solution to the tension between conservation objectives and livelihoods in protected areas is involving local people in forest protection activities. The research examined the performance of one initiative, involving...
The scale of collective action required for global sustainability is feasible only to the extent that efforts at this level can build on the trust, reciprocity and cooperation already established at lower levels. Such a bottom-up process of building capacities for global sustainability is one of community-based environmental governance, at least wh...
As an alternative livelihood approach to improve forest conservation and reduce dependency on non-wood forest products (NWFPs), the government of Vietnam has implemented community-based ecotourism (CBE) in the relation to protected area management. One such initiative is the Talai Ecotourism Venture for the ethnic groups living in the buffer zone o...
This paper reports a national-scale assessment of disaster resilience, using the Australian Disaster Resilience Index. The index assesses resilience at three levels: overall capacity for disaster resilience; coping and adaptive capacity; and, eight themes of disaster resilience across social, economic and institutional domains. About 32% of Austral...
There is growing evidence that collection of non-timber-forest products (NTFPs) remains an essential part of livelihoods for people living near protected areas in developing countries. This study examined the nature and level of livelihood reliance of households on the collection and use of NTFPs and alternative income streams for three ethnic grou...
Context
There is growing recognition that sustainable development of smallholder agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa requires a systems approach. One response to this has been applying the agricultural innovation systems concept and the use of Innovation Platforms (IP) as tools for agricultural development. By providing social space and facilitating...
Context: There is growing recognition that sustainable development of smallholder agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa requires a systems approach. One response to this has been applying the agricultural innovation systems concept and the use of Innovation Platforms (IP) as tools for agricultural development. By providing social space and facilitating...
Although the economic impact of weeds on Australian vegetable production has been estimated at the national level, information on the farm-level economic impacts of weeds in this industry is limited. Previous research suggests that vegetable farmers have difficulty in reliably estimating the economic impacts of weeds within their crops. This resear...
The authors trace the development of theorising about polycentric governance and its importance to the research program of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and the emergence of the Bloomington School. They offer and discuss definitions of polycentric governance, and of polycentric governance arrangements and polycentric governance systems (the latter bein...
Neoliberalism is frequently blamed for challenges in achieving sustainable development; consequently some also question if sustainability is still a useful concept. Neoliberal influence on natural resource management has evolved over the last 30 years to a hybrid form that seeks to compensate for its negative social and environmental externalities....
Weeds are a persistent problem for vegetable producers because of the favourable growing conditions, regular soil disturbance and the lack of registered herbicides available to selectively control broadleaf weeds. The potential for weed growth within and between rows of vegetable crops is therefore high. Since 2011, we have been conducting research...
The primary objectives of the research documented is this report were to:
1. evaluate the economic efficiency of the market-purchase and water-saving approaches to environmental water recovery as they have been applied in the New South Wales (NSW) portion of the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), Australia, through three completed water-recovery programs;...
This chapter considers how the literary imagination has influenced cultural attitudes to water in the settler colonial context where an arid environment posed enormous imaginary challenges for those from regions with predictable rainfall patterns. By way of example, we focus on Australia, the driest inhabited country on earth, and Dorothea Mackella...
The Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index (ANDRI) is Australia’s first national-scale standardised snapshot of disaster resilience. Because of its national extent, the ANDRI takes a top-down approach using indicators derived from secondary data. The ANDRI has a hierarchical design based on coping and adaptive capacities representing the pote...
The creation of cultural flows is significantly more complex than simply the reallocation of water to Aboriginal
people or the provision of a flow of water for cultural purposes. This paper has provided a preliminary overview of traditional customary practices through a property rights lens in order to focus attention on the nature of the rights th...
Motivation plays a powerful role in guiding human decision-making and behaviour, including adaptation to climate change. This study aimed to determine whether community-based governance would increase behavioural support, in the form of donation behaviour, for a climate change adaptation trust fund. A sample of 548 Australians were randomly assigne...
The concept of institutional path dependence offers useful ways of understanding the trajectories of water policy reforms and how past institutional arrangements, policy paradigms and development patterns constrain current and future choices and limit institutional adaptability. The value of this concept is demonstrated through an analysis of envir...
Firmly grounded in common-pool resource theory and related developments in transaction cost economics, Dustin Garrick’s new book Water Allocation in Rivers under Pressure raises to a new level the conceptual sophistication and empirical rigour that this research tradition has become well known for. His goal in the book “is to make transaction costs...
Assessment of disaster resilience using an index is often a key element of natural hazard
management and planning. Many assessments have been undertaken worldwide. Emerging
from these are a set of seven common properties that should be considered in the design of
any disaster resilience assessment: assessment purpose, top-down or bottom-up assessme...
The social-ecological systems (SES) framework was developed to support communication across the multiple disciplines concerned with sustainable provision and/or appropriation of common-pool resources (CPRs). Transformation activities (e.g., processing, distribution, retailing) in which value is added to resource units appropriated from CPRs were im...
The concept of adaptive governance has become increasingly advocated by scholars of social-ecological systems as essential for sustainability as we proceed into a more complex and less predictable world. This concept has become closely associated in this research community with polycentricity and related governance concepts. As the number of schola...
Australia's recently adopted National Strategy for Disaster Resilience recognizes four characteristics of disaster resilient communities: 1) they function well while under stress 2) they adapt successfully 3) they are self-reliant and 4) they have strong social capacity. However important questions are raised. How would progress towards the develop...
Since the 1980s, natural resource management (NRM) in Australia and New Zealand has been an ambitious experiment with community engagement. Underpinned by theory about public participation, adult education and agricultural extension, but also influenced by neoliberalism's calls for ‘smaller government’, governments embraced engagement as a cost-eff...
Local level institutional arrangements have been promoted by government and development agencies in Ghana as vehicles for sustainable water resource governance and rural development. However, these arrangements often lack the requisite capacities to fulfil their roles and responsibilities in this domain. This paper explores the existing capacities...
Water resources management in both the Murray-Darling and Colorado River Basins is fragmented across the borders of states within federal government systems, as well as in the latter case across a national border (USA/Mexico). Furthermore, the governments of these states and nations have limited abilities
to control other enterprises (whether publi...
Research on the adoption of rural innovations is reviewed and interpreted through a cross-disciplinary lens to provide practical guidance for research, extension and policy relating to conservation practices. Adoption of innovations by landholders is presented as a dynamic learning process. Adoption depends on a range of personal, social, cultural...
We respond in this article to scholars having identified a theory-practice gap commonly afflicting applications of integrated water resources management (IWRM) internationally, and thus a need for the concept to be recast according to evidence of how integration of fragmented water management efforts actually occurs. The Murray-Darling Basin (MDB)...
Adaptations in environmental management often involve complex problems of collective action. Institutions introduced to reduce the transaction costs of solving these problems often come at considerable cost. An Institutional Cost Effectiveness Analysis Framework (ICEAF) developed to
provide a comprehensive and logical structure for economic evaluat...
Effective control of invasive weeds such as serrated tussock (Nassella trichotoma) requires collective
action by land managers across the landscape. We explored the impediments to adoption of weed
control practices amongst private and public land managers, and the potential of collective action programs
to overcome these impediments. A case study a...
‘Community-based’ natural resource governance has been sponsored by Australian governments since the 1980s as a way of strengthening farmers’ self-reliance in adopting conservation practices. Our understanding of how this outcome may be achieved has mainly reflected thinking in the discipline of rural extension. Ideas from the theory of collective...
This submission focuses on the importance when reviewing the Australian Government’s Caring for our Country program (CfoC) of examining how the program might be changed in ways conducive to transition of arrangements for natural resources governance towards those of adaptive governance. Practical steps in preparation for this transition are present...
Research on the adoption of rural innovations is reviewed and interpreted through a cross-disciplinary lens to provide practical guidance for research, extension and policy relating to conservation practices. Adoption of innovations by landholders is presented as a dynamic learning process. Adoption depends on a range of personal, social, cultural...
The purpose of this document was to lay the foundations for identifying an approach to economic accountability that is: (a) consistent with stated reasons for adopting a community-based strategy for environmental management; (b) cost-effective to apply given the capacities of community-based organizations; and (c) consistent with an ‘economic way o...
Climate change is indeed a political/institutional problem, but Professor Brennan’s definition of that problem is not the only one accepted within the mainstream of the economics profession. I have observed that the zero-contribution thesis underpinning his conclusion that international carbon reduction efforts will fail remains under severe challe...
Critiques of governance arrangements for natural resource management in Australia have expanded rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, arguments have strengthened internationally that drylands share characteristics that justify a specific ‘drylands syndrome’ understanding of their management. These issues converge in the drylands of the Murray-Darling...
The purpose of this paper is to (a) justify and explain an economic method for evaluating investments in natural resource management (NRM) consistently with the ‘collaborative vision’ for environmental and natural resource governance, and (b) provide an account of trials of this method by three Catchment Management Authorities (CMAs) in New South W...
Investment in the robustness of Australia’s governance systems is required if they are to cope
with an increasingly uncertain and surprising world. Attempts to transform these systems in
response to the challenges faced since the 1970s have been constrained by persistent modernist
beliefs encouraging a confidence in the predictability of social-eco...
The results of this study will assist technology adoption in the Indonesian beef industry by providing a better understanding of the role that social institutions can play in the adoption process. It may assist in targeting government development programs for the livestock sector, and increasing opportunities for cattle producers to link with the b...
Geoffrey Brennan's argument that climate change is essentially a political / institutional problem has my support. However, I disagree with how he defined the problem and with his conclusions. Climate change may be a political/institutional problem, but Professor Brennan’s characterisation of that problem is not the only one accepted within the mai...
Significant steps have occurred under Australia's 'regional delivery model' towards devolving responsibilities for natural resource management (NRM) to community-based regional bodies, particularly in respect of motivating farmers to adopt priority conservation practices. Challenges remain in effectively engaging the large populations covered by th...
Since the 1980s, Australian governments have sponsored participatory, decentralised approaches to natural resource management (NRM). This style of governance has often been described as ‘community based’. Such approaches have been chosen as a means for supporting farmers’ self-reliance
in adopting conservation practices, where self-reliance is defi...
This chapter began with the complex challenge faced by regional bodies in making community-based NRM work at the scale of large and populous regions,– as required under Australia’s regional delivery model. Observing that the ‘nesting principle’ had been proposed from international research as a possible foundation for addressing challenges of this...
Objectivism, universalism, mechanism, atomism and monism are five elements of modernist thought that have deeply influenced Australian governance in the past century. This has led to a form of administrative rationalism that has been further influenced by neoliberal economic policies that together have not played well for resilience. Confidence in...
Community-based approaches to environmental management have become widely adopted over the last two decades. From their origins in grassroots frustrations with governmental inabilities to solve local environmental problems, these approaches are now sponsored frequently by governments as a way of dealing with such problems at much higher spatial lev...
From Foreword: "Since the 1980s, community-based natural resource management (NRM) in rural areas of Australia has evolved from its origins with small groups of farmers to the present situation, under the regional delivery model, where regional bodies are expected to foster community ownership and voluntary cooperation from the large and diverse po...
Community-based approaches to environmental management have become widely adopted over the last two decades. From their origins in grassroots frustrations with governmental inabilities to solve local environmental problems, these approaches are now sponsored frequently by governments as a way of dealing with such problems at much higher spatial lev...
The concept of 'social capital' is becoming increasingly important in understanding and encouraging smallholders in transition and developing economies to participate in new markets. The concept is useful in so far as it focuses attention on the role of networks, trust and relationships as a resource to be nurtured, maintained and utilised sustaina...
The concept of ‘social capital’ is becoming increasingly important in understanding and encouraging smallholders in transition and developing economies to participate in new markets. The concept is useful in so far as it focuses attention on the role of networks, trust and relationships as a resource to be nurtured, maintained and utilised sustaina...
Research on the adoption of rural innovations is reviewed and interpreted through a cross-disciplinary lens to provide practical guidance for research, extension and policy relating to conservation practices. Adoption of innovations by landholders is presented as a dynamic learning process. Adoption depends on a range of personal, social, cultural...
Improving smallholder welfare in the rural sectors of developing countries requires improving access to both input and product markets. Success, however, in developing sustainable and mutually beneficial links between smallholders and agribusiness has been variable. Two recent ACIAR studies concluded that there may be more to linking smallholders w...
One of the pivotal forces behind regionalisation of natural resource management was the change in funding arrangements between federal and state governments for achieving improvements in natural
resource outcomes. These funding changes, in some states, required many changes in the structure, role,
and responsibilities of as well as personnel involv...
After summarizing the characteristics of enduring common property regimes, we draw on three projects we have been closely involved with to describe how legal entities or corporate structures might be employed to enhance robustness of the institutional arrangements. All are Australian grazing systems, one in the Mallee rangelands and Riverland in So...
"Recent decades have witnessed a marked acceleration of agro- industrialisation processes in much of the developing world. This is opening up new opportunities for smallholders, even in isolated areas, to escape poverty by trading in the resulting new markets. There is, however, increasing recognition of the constraints faced by poor smallholders i...
Projects in the forestry sector, and land-use change and forestry projects more generally, have the potential to help mitigate global warming by acting as sinks for greenhouse gasses, particularly CO2. However, concerns have been expressed that participation in carbon-sink projects may be constrained by high costs. This problem may be particularly...
Elinor Ostrom (2009 Nobel Economics Co-Laureate): "This book is simply a little gem. I have used it myself in my own graduate seminar. I have already written several colleagues with recommendations that they get the book immediately. So, I am not writing a rave book review and then not using the book myself. It is an amazing synthesis of earlier wo...
Lessons learnt and progress achieved in a project seeking to catalyse establishment of a group, or common property, farming enterprise are reported in this article. The project concept grew from successful experiences of the farmers initiating the project in working together to address shared environmental issues. It was concerned with appraising t...
Contemporary issues in many countries include the failure of property rights to facilitate adaptation of rural land uses in response to the declining economic, environmental and social sustainability of an increasing number of rural communities. Many individual rural properties (whether under freehold or leasehold) are too small to be ecologically...
Compliance with many agri-environmental programs fails to meet expectations due to enforcement difficulties. One response has been devolution of enforcement rights and responsibilities to industry organisations. This kind of response is based on a belief that farmers cooperate more with their industry organisations than with government in ensuring...
The track record of community-based programs of natural resources governance in implementing the plans they have developed has been patchy at best. In particular, hopes that farmers' participation in decision-making within such programs would lead them to cooperate more voluntarily in implementing agreed solutions are frequently not realised. This...
The aim of this project has been to “develop an innovative way of managing a collective group of farms and in doing so create new ways to use human, natural, built and community resources to provide a more enriched environment for the stakeholders”. This “innovative way” was to involve “a syndicate of farms all managed under one entity to achieve e...
"Despite the complexity of watershed management, policy-makers in Australia and other countries have given little systematic attention to the challenge of learning how to organise it effectively. Meanwhile, evidence has emerged that community-based organisational systems with enduring success in addressing complex problems of natural resource manag...
"Collective action in conserving common-pool natural resources involves the problem of enforcing individuals? commitments to cooperate. Historically, many resource-conservation programs have failed to meet their expectations due to the high transaction (including political) costs of government enforcement of compliance by individuals with what they...
This paper provides an assessment of the potential for small-holder agro-forestry projects to be competitive in markets for carbon emission reduction credits, and explores the ways in which small-holder participation in such markets may be facilitated. The paper begins with an overview of the issue of global warming and the role of carbon sinks in...
Adaptive management has become one of the catchphrases of the sustainable development literature, and is referred to increasingly in natural resource policy deliberations. Its advocates argue that natural resource sustainability issues are addressed more realistically and usefully as complex adaptive systems than as mechanistic systems. Resource ec...
A recurring theme in recent Australian reports on integrated catchment management (ICM) has been the need to institutionalise more formally the cost-sharing commitments made within this domain. This represents a significant departure from earlier visions of ICM as essentially promoting voluntary uptake of resource-conservation measures. Two importa...
The problem of global warming, together with the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and associated institutions, has sparked intense interest and research in the energy and forestry sectors. Projects in the forestry sector, and land-use change and forestry projects (LUCF) more generally, have the potential to help...
The paper sketches an overall resource governance framework which builds on the strengths
of cooperative federalism that have become evident with the Council of Australian Governments water reform process, the strengths of State integrated catchment management (elsewhere called integrated watershed management or integrated water resources managemen...
Use of benefit‐cost analysis for economic comparison of agricultural research projects remains confounded, by lack of rigour in specifying the without‐project scenario and how benefits from an innovation endure after its adoption declines. Failure to account for the without‐project scenario favours projects to the extent that more benefits are fore...
A collaborative vision for agri-environmental governance⎯whereby collaboration among
stakeholders in addressing problems supposedly leads them to cooperate more in
implementing solutions⎯emerged in the 1980’s. This vision was prompted by mounting
dissatisfaction with the progressive vision upon which such governance had been founded, a vision that...
Questions
Questions (3)
Often the difference between these concepts is left unclear. Of those scholars who do address the difference, some view management as a subset of governance, and others see it as separate. How do you see the difference? And/or can you please recommend a useful reference?
The transaction costs concept was introduced so economics could understand behaviors that could not otherwise be explained (e.g, emergence of firms). However, this has left many applied economists wondering about where to draw the line in identifying particular costs as either production (or abatement) costs or transaction costs. Given that production costs are often influenced by the costs of transacting in respect of production activities (e.g., searching for least-cost inputs), is it indeed necessary to acknowledge limits on our abilities to distinguish transaction costs from production costs? Your answers or pointers to relevant literature would be greatly appreciated.
Douglass North refers to 'adaptive efficiency' without, in my knowledge, really defining it. Do you know of a good definition for this concept?