This article addresses the organisation design of government agencies to facilitate sustainability and the statutory mechanisms needed to implement sustainability. Using sustainability as a purpose for the basis of organisation design, and considering task interdependence and differentiation, appropriate organisation structures for achieving sustainability are proposed. Types of market failure that lead to unsustainable outcomes are identified—tragedy of the commons, unpriced public assets, externalities and free riders. To correct for market failure, legislative provisions for management mechanisms to achieve sustainability are needed. Legislation in Western Australia is reviewed in terms of its ability to deliver sustainability. Achievement of sustainability also requires monitoring and evaluation on the progress towards sustainable outcomes. The role of the National Land and Water Resources Audit in contributing to sustainability in water resource management is noted. It is concluded that there is a need for a wide-ranging review of institutional arrangements with respect to organisation design, management mechanisms and legislative provisions to identify changes that are needed to achieve sustainability and subsequently the adoption and implementation of these changes.

Environmental partnerships (‘green alliances’) between NGOs and business, provide an additional policy option which can make a variety of contributions to environmental protection and ultimately, to sustainable development. Yet despite the potential policy significance of such partnerships, our knowledge of, what works and what does not work, and or how best to design such partnerships, remains very limited. From the author's own empirical work and from the broader analytical and empirical literature, this article seeks to identify the circumstances in which such partnerships can most beneficially be formed, their major commercial and environmental benefits, and the design factors which will influence their success.

Forest plantations can provide an important wood resource for regional industries as well as other benefits such as salinity abatement, land rehabilitation, biomass production and carbon sequestration. A strategic plantation capability and suitability assessment was undertaken for New South Wales to determine the potential of regions to support hardwood and softwood plantations for a range of purposes. The plantation capability assessment used the Physiological Principles for Predicting Growth (3-PG) model to simulate potential tree growth in plantations and the land suitability assessment identified cleared private land that is potentially suitable for plantation establishment. The study concluded that there is land within NSW regions that is suitable for plantations and capable of growing trees in plantations for a range of purposes. In addition to the outputs of this biophysically based plantation capability and suitability assessment, strategic regional planning also needs to consider the potential economic returns, social concerns, environmental issues and other relevant factors.

During its time in office, the Kennett Government in Victoria implemented sweeping reforms across the Victorian public sector, including the introduction of an economic rationalist approach to national parks management. Discourse analysis is used to argue that such an approach to national parks management limited relevant inputs to decision-making, portrayed visitors to national parks as customers and presented national parks as neatly packaged experiences to be consumed by different market segments, to the detriment of environmental and community values. The unexpected election of the Bracks Labor Government at the 1999 State election raised expectations that commercialisation of national parks would be stopped. To date, the Bracks Government has addressed the more controversial initiatives proposed by the Kennett Government although significant elements of the Kennett Government's approach remain in operation.

The risk management standard and the associated environmental guide set out a process for establishing risk, its acceptability and appropriate management for whatever issue is at hand. However, some risk usually remains for a host of reasons including lack of knowledge and resources, as well as the impossibility of having a risk free world. In many cases this remaining or residual risk may be well understood, easily managed, or unimportant. However, in other cases the opposite may hold. Residual risk is usually considered ‘acceptable’, or more accurately ‘tolerable’, and from a management perspective is therefore often ignored. In some cases, the residual risk may be unacceptable from an ecological or environmental perspective, even if it seems acceptable from an economic perspective. Even though the chance of a negative event occurring would normally be low, the consequences could nevertheless be very serious or irreversible. In this article, we describe residual risk, how it emerges from the process of risk management, and why it is particularly important in natural resource management. A case study illustrates some of the issues and possible ways forward. The risk management standard should be applied through a process designed to build commitment by stakeholders to manage the risks and develop contingency plans for the residual. Local capacity building may often be an important pre-requisite for the success of this approach.

Local decision-making is crucial to the process of retaining the habitat of threatened species on private lands. However, there has been little attention given to the issue of local government and biodiversity conservation. The objective of this study was to assist Coffs Harbour City Council interpret a draft Plan of Management for koalas within its borders. The study was designed to answer two questions: 1) What will be the economic impact on residents of the requirement to abide by New South Wales state environmental planning policy to conserve koalas (SEPP 44), by way of individual development approvals; and 2) What will be the economic impact on residents of implementing SEPP 44 by way of a shire-wide Plan of Management. A comparison of the costs and benefits of a shire-wide plan shows that the benefits were more than double those of the costs of piecemeal decision-making, i.e. a decision after a development application has been lodged. Thus, a strategic approach is cost-efficient. The success of this work should provide an impetus for other councils currently considering whether to adopt a shire-wide program for conserving remnant koala habitat on private lands within their jurisdiction.