Introduction

The ultimate responsibility for achieving sustainable natural resource management resides with the government. It is the government's responsibility to establish the policy, legislation and administrative structures, which was discussed in Chapter 2, to enable and facilitate the community's sustainable use of natural resources. The primary responsibility for the management and use of natural resources remains a matter for the owners of the natural resources, consistent with government policy. Within any framework of policies and institutions for land management it is land managers who have the responsibility to interpret government policy in order to implement actions to meet policy objectives. Land managers have the most direct impact on the quality of natural resources through their management practices.

Within the framework of policies the traditional approach by governments to land management was command and control policy (CCP), which was largely replaced by integrated natural resource management approaches in the 1980–90s. The Landcare movement of the 1990s was responsible for information transfer on sustainable land management practices and persuading agricultural producers of the need for change (Cary et al., 2002). However, the policy framework was unable to satisfactorily address long-term and large-scale natural resource problems.

Agricultural producers are keen to adopt new practices that yield greater short-term returns. In most cases these increased returns do not fully account for the long-term detrimental effects on the natural resources affected by their use (van Bueren and Pannell, 1999; Pannell et al., 2001).