Water markets and associated allocation policy reforms have struggled to achieve their intended goals in many water-stressed rivers, in part due to the institutional friction imposed by transition and transaction costs. This paper elaborates a transaction costs analysis framework to examine the...

The use of market-based instruments (MBIs) to provide and protect ecosystem services has gained significant attention in Australia. Despite their popularity, MBIs are not appropriate for the provision of all ecosystem services. Rather, MBIs must be carefully designed given the ecosystem service...

The lack of appropriate incentives through conventional markets is a major cause of deterioration of biodiversity on private land. In response, governments often intervene through changing the incentives faced by landholders. There are, however, potentially many ways that the incentives to...

Rural residential development could have a positive or negative effect on the supply of ecosystem services. In most cases, the effect tends to be negative. One way of managing the impact is through a market based instrument. In this paper we present a development offset MBI as a way of cost...

Choosing a mechanism to encourage landholders to change their land management in order to deliver environmental outcomes is a complicated process. Careful instrument selection may count for little if uptake and adoption are insufficient to meet performance targets. Similarly, investors may...

Regulatory regimes intended to enforce changes to land use or management impose costs on landholders and governments. Landholder costs comprise changes to capital equipment, changes to crop or enterprise management including direct compliance costs, opportunity costs of lost production, and...

There is a growing literature reporting the extent of transaction costs for environmental policies. However understanding why transaction costs occur and why they are small or large is also important for efficient policy selection and evaluation. Following an analysis of the organisational...

This paper develops a decision support framework that assists managers in the urban water industry to analyse a mix of water service options, at the whole-of-city scale. The decision support framework moves decision-making in urban water systems from traditional command and control approaches...

Alternatives to the current buy-back of water entitlements by the government in the Murray Darling Basin are assessed using multiple criteria based on the western U.S. experience, real options theory, scenario analysis and policy adoption criteria. This analysis suggests the following benefits...

The use of market-based instruments (MBIs) to provide and protect ecosystem services has gained significant attention in Australia. Despite their popularity, MBIs are not appropriate for the provision of all ecosystem services. Rather, MBIs must be carefully designed given the ecosystem service...