Jayanath Ananda

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Verified

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• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at Central Queensland University

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda calls for safe drinking water and sanitation for all communities around the world and the use of water in a sustainable and efficient manner. Although under less scrutiny in developed countries, network water losses can be a costly resource misallocation. This paper analyses real water losses in drinki...

The growing interest in customer engagement (CE) has triggered a new wave of reforms, particularly in utility regulation. Within the water sector, there has been a shift from a focus on cost‐reflective pricing toward customer‐centric pricing processes designed to identify customer preferences and expectations. The Victorian water sector in Australi...

Household food waste occupies the lion share of the total food waste in developed countries and engenders substantial economic and environmental costs around the globe. It is a complex, multifaceted problem and is a key component of national food waste reduction plans. Although the factors that influence food waste are known, the magnitude of their...

This paper analyses the impact of rate capping policy on local council efficiency. It also examines a set of exogenous factors associated with local government efficiency. A semi-parametric framework based on data envelopment analysis is applied to construct an efficient frontier for Victorian local governments. Findings indicate that rate capping...

Meal leftovers are a major component of household food waste. However, there is a limited understanding of leftover food management behaviours, which can assist in reducing food waste in household settings. This study segments households with distinctive behaviours associated with meal leftover management. Principal component analysis and cluster a...

Food leftovers are a major contributor to household food waste. However, the drivers of household food leftover management practices are less understood. This study analyses the leftover food management behaviour using the Motivation-Opportunity-Ability framework. A Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) analysis was used to empirically test the in...

Bread, the most consumed floury product in the world, is one of the most wasted food products across the food supply chain. Yet, there is a paucity of research examining the magnitude of bread waste and behavioural drivers associated with it at the household level. This study analyses the incidence, behavioural drivers and disposal pathways of brea...

The rapid growth of online grocery shopping can have significant economic, social and environmental implications. However, the influence of changing consumer food acquisition practices on household food waste has received less attention in the literature. Moreover, there is a dearth of household studies that account for zero values of self-reported...

Food waste is a significant global problem. In the global north, households are a major driver of food waste generation and also a key enabler of solutions to address the issue. Leftover food management is identified as one of the key areas that can be targeted to reduce food waste at home. Although a large body of literature exists on household foo...

The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of household food management routines on the amount of food waste. We build on past studies, many of which have used the theory of planned behavior to explain food waste, by incorporating actual food waste. The repetitive and routinised nature of diverse food management routines in the household leads...

Food rescue has been identified as a sustainable approach in preventing wastage of surplus food and achieving food security. Although food insecurity is widely prevalent in developing countries, there is a paucity of research investigating food donations and rescue operations in these countries. This study focuses on surplus food redistribution act...

Household food management behavior changed considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic. A growing body of work has quantified the impact of lockdowns on household food waste. Yet, previous studies used a retrospective study design which undermines the accuracy of the causal effect on household food waste. This paper investigates the causal impact of...

The drinking water and wastewater services often involve heterogenous production environments and considerable negative externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions. Conventional productivity measurements do not factor in either of these issues. This paper analyses the environmentally sensitive productivity change in the Australian drinking water...

Conserving natural resources has socio-cultural underpinnings. Food is a fundamental natural resource, and its waste at the household level has received significant attention across the globe. Food waste reduction campaigns are a prominent way to bring social change to minimise food waste. This study explores the influence of food waste reduction c...

Maintaining productivity and technical efficiency of salinity affected rice farming is essential for food security in Bangladesh, given trends of increasing rates of salinity incursion. Using Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey (BIHS) data, collected by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and a translog stochastic production es...

Household food waste is a global problem that is often tackled by focusing on key behaviours leading to overall food waste. An important entry point to develop interventions is to understand food category-specific behavioural links to household food waste. However, there is a limited focus on this approach in the food waste literature. This paper e...

This study reports parents’ perceptions about children’s influence on the generation of household food by collecting qualitative data from 15 focus groups of Australian householders from five culturally diverse communities. Key findings include food over-purchase to some extent results from children applying pressure on their parents to impulse buy...

Drinking water and sanitation services are vulnerable to adverse climate impacts such as persistent low rainfall, extreme droughts and floods. The sector also contributes to climate change by its considerable emissions footprint. Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in order to tackle climate change have put a spotlight on the environm...

There are generational differences in beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours with respect to food consumption and waste in households. Understanding these generational differences is necessary to be able to effectively combat household food waste. However, there is a deficit in studies that focus on these differences. To address this gap, we analysed s...

Understanding the influence of tourism-linked factors on direct and indirect employment is important for tourism planning, particularly for tourism-dependent developing economies. Yet, related studies on developing countries are scant. This research considers trends of tourism growth in Sri Lanka over 1972–2018 using state-of-the-art machine learni...

Groundwater governance has become an intractable policy issue, which has many implications for the living standards and well-being of millions of rural poor in South Asia. Groundwater governance is complex as it is influenced by various hydrogeological, sociopolitical and socioeconomic factors. Unregulated groundwater extraction rates in South Asia...

Wastewater services involve complex technical and environmental processes. Conventional performance assessments often disregard the service quality aspects of the sector. This article applies an advanced semi-parametric modelling framework based on data envelopment analysis to measure the economic efficiency of wastewater service provision in Austr...

Current water governance systems and processes are often insufficient to deal with the challenge of climate uncertainty. Adapting to climate uncertainty requires trialing out new experiments in water governance and establishing processes to learn from those experiments. Social learning is regarded as an important aspect that supports the transforma...

Providing secure and affordable drinking water and sewerage services is the primary mandate of the urban water industry. Water businesses must balance their service obligations and the quality of service delivered in order to maximize customer value. Being a monopoly industry, the urban water sector’s service levels and associated prices are not dr...

Demand for drinking water and wastewater services has increased drastically due to increased urbanization and population growth worldwide. The provision of these services entails several negative externalities including greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Conventional economic performance evaluation methods often ignore the negative externalities of p...

Water, energy and greenhouse emissions issues are intertwined and are difficult to resolve in isolation. One of the challenges in addressing the water-energy-emissions nexus is the lack of studies that integrate both the environmental and economic aspects. The provision of drinking water and wastewater services is a complex operation that involves...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the sensitivity of economic efficiency rankings of water businesses to the choice of alternative physical and accounting capital input measures. Design/methodology/approach Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to compute efficiency rankings for government-owned water businesses from the state of...

Climate change adds another layer of uncertainty to the complex issue of urban water infrastructure provision. Current institutional configurations surrounding infrastructure investments are deemed inflexible and ill-equipped to deal with climate uncertainty. This paper evaluates the regulatory and planning frameworks surrounding the urban water in...

Watershed development (WSD) is one of the core strategies to arrest widespread resource degradation and reduce poverty in India’s semiarid regions. Although many WSD initiatives had positive short-term impacts, long-term returns to investment have been questioned. Overall, past approaches of WSD programmes have had slow, inequitable and short-lived...

This paper empirically analyses the efficiency of urban water utilities using state-of-the-art methodology combining Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and a two-stage double bootstrap procedure. In the first stage, robust efficiency estimates are obtained with an improved DEA analysis. In the second stage, a truncated regression model and a double bo...

Despite the popularity and rhetoric of collaborative approaches, the successes of such initiatives are not widespread and remain elusive. Some commentators argue that without ‘the noise of participation’, a return to centralised governance should be reconsidered. Whilst this conclusion may be premature given the lack of rigorous analysis of collabo...

Water institutions in South Asia play a crucial role in managing scarce water resources and are central to economic development and poverty alleviation. Designing appropriate institutional mechanisms to allocate scarce water and river flows has been an enormous challenge due to the complex legal, constitutional and social issues involved. Notwithst...

Formulating sustainable forest policy has become a crucial issue today with the increased awareness of global environmental problems including global warming and climate change. Conflict resolution in natural resource management and planning is recognized as an important aspect of participatory development. Policy decisions on the use and managemen...

In India’s semi-arid regions, watershed development (WSD) is one of the core strategies used to arrest widespread resource degradation and reduce poverty. Annually, a substantial amount of capital is invested in WSD programmes in India albeit questionable performance to date. In recent years, many WSD programmes have taken a participatory approach,...

This paper examines the role of local institutions in supporting climate change adaptation action from a public policy perspective. While certain adaptation actions will provide public benefits, many others will offer private benefits. The paper argues that adaptation investments and assigning the adaptation responsibility across various actors sho...

This paper provides a review of research contributions on forest management and planning using multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) based on an exhaustive literature survey. The review primarily focuses on the application aspects highlighting theoretical underpinnings and controversies. It also examines the nature of the problems addressed and inc...

Formulating sustainable forest policy has become a crucial issue today with the increased awareness of global environmental problems including global warming and climate change. Public participation has been identified as an integral part of sustainable forest policy. However, formulating ecologically sustainable forest policy has been a highly con...

A ‘roadmap’ has been devised for a progressive greening of the Australian chemical industry over the next two decades. The roadmap is based on a set of interactive principles broadly termed ‘economic’, ‘social’, ‘technological’, ‘environmental’ and ‘political’, which collectively form the ‘drivers of change’ in chemical industry strategy/business/p...

Forest management policy decisions are complex due to the multiple-use nature of goods and services from forests, difficulty in monetary valuation of ecological services and the involvement of a large number of stakeholders. Multi-attribute decision techniques can be used to synthesise stakeholder preferences related to regional forest planning bec...

Forest policy decisions are often a source of debate, conflict, and tension in many countries. The debate over forest land-use decisions often hinges on disagreements about societal values related to forest resource use. Disagreements on social value positions are fought out repeatedly at local, regional, national, and international levels at an en...

Water institutions in India play a crucial role in managing scarce water resources and are central to economic development and poverty alleviation. Designing appropriate institutional mechanisms to allocate scarce water and river flows has been an enormous challenge due to the complex legal, constitutional, and social issues involved. The Indian wa...

The Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) programme introduced in the 1990s, in Australia to protect environmental values, encourage job creation and growth and manage forests in an ecologically sustainable manner. Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) techniques were used in this study to assess their potential for examining the RFA policy. The empiri...

b>Contents: 1. Role of multi-criteria decision making in natural resource management / Gamini Herath and Tony Prato 2. Analysis of forest policy using multi-attribute value theory / Jayanath Ananda and Gamini Herath 3. Comparing Riparian revegetation policy options using the analytic hierarchy process / M. E. Qureshi and S. R. Harrison 4. Managing...

We give semiparametric identification and estimation results for econometric models with a regressor that is endogenous, bound censored and selected,called a Tobin regressor. First, we show that true parameter value is set identified and characterize the identification sets. Second, we propose novel estimation and inference methods for this true va...

Counter-acting forces to increase rural production and/or its efficiency, and to sustain an ecosystem now recognised to be under increasing and destructive pressures have created exigencies in achieving balanced natural resource management (NRM). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the management of the Murray Darling System in south-eastern Aust...

Forest policy decisions inherently involve multiple attributes and risk and uncertainty as they largely deal with complex biological, ecological, and socio-political systems. Identifying risk preferences and quantifying their inter-relationships and tradeoffs are useful in formulating better forest policy. Often, technocrats and experts deal with r...

Forest policy-makers increasingly recognise the importance of public participation in planning and policy-making endeavours. In many countries, public participation has been institutionalised into national forest policy. Despite the stated policy assurances, implementing participatory approaches has been a challenging task. This paper examines the...

Soil erosion is the single most important environmental degradation problem in the developing world. Despite the plethora of literature that exists on the incidence, causes and impacts of soil erosion, a concrete understanding of this complex problem is lacking. This paper examines the soil erosion problem in developing countries in order to unders...

Forest management involves multiple objectives, multiple stakeholders, complex socio-ecological and political interactions. Public involvement in forest decision making is a challenging task that involves controversies. Various participatory tools such as public consultation forums, public comment processes, opinion polls are used to consult and to...

Forest management decisions are often characterised by complexity, irreversibility and uncertainty. Much of the complexity arises from the multiple-use nature of forest goods and services, difficulty in monetary valuation of ecological services and the involvement of numerous stakeholders. Under these circumstances, conventional methods such as cos...

Wilderness is a unique environmental resource that provides a multitude of use and non-use benefits. The use and management of wilderness depend on the assessment of wilderness quality. Current wilderness assessment in Australia is based on two broad criteria, the remoteness and naturalness of the wilderness, determined using geographic information...

Tea has been Sri Lanka’s major export earner for several decades. However, soil erosion on tea‐producing land has had considerable on‐site and off‐site effects. This study quantifies soil erosion impacts for smallholder tea farms in Sri Lanka by estimating a yield damage function and an erosion damage function using a subjective elicitation techniq...

The role of commodity prices and subsidies on the adoption of soil conservation has been widely debated yet is poorly understood. One reason for this is the complex nature of the relationship between soil loss and yield damage. This paper examines the effects of price and subsidy policy on adoption of soil conservation measures in tea lands in Sri...

Considerable growth has been achieved in agricultural production, specifically in export crops in developing countries over the last few decades. However, now there are concerns that production growth may not be sustainable under current agricultural practices. One of the primary sustainability concerns in Sri Lanka, is that of productivity decline...

The working papers are a series of manuscripts in their draft form. Please do not quote without obtaining the author's consent as these works are in their draft form. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and not necessarily endorsed by the School or IBISWorld Pty Ltd.