The strategy you have when you have to have a strategy (without actually having one)

By Peter Burnett

In November 2019 Australia’s federal and state environment ministers signed off on a new national biodiversity strategy. Under the title Australia’s Strategy for Nature, it replaces the previous strategy, Australia’s Biodiversity Conservation Strategy 2010–2030 (the 2010 Strategy), even though the 2010 strategy had more than 10 years to run.

The new strategy comes with its own shiny new website, Australia’s Nature Hub, and it reads pretty well. But here’s the kicker: the new strategy doesn’t actually contain any strategies (ie means to achieving ends).

And there’s no new money or programs to support it, although the new website does serve as an aggregator for existing strategies and programs from various governments. As we’ll see below, the implication seems to be that if you think we need to do more to halt biodiversity decline, do it yourself!

It’s a ‘compliance model’

So what’s going on? If the new strategy were a car, it would be a ‘compliance model’, a car that manufacturers produce in limited numbers to comply with a regulatory requirement to sell ‘zero emission’ vehicles.

The best known example of a compliance car was the EV1, an electric car that General Motors produced in America in the late 1990s. Instead of selling the car to customers, GM leased it to them; once the leases expired it recalled the cars and sent them to the crusher.*

In this case, the requirement generating a compliance mentality is Article 6 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Australia joined the CBD, along with most other countries, soon after it was opened for signature in 1992. Article 6 requires each member country to ‘develop national strategies … for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity’.

Australia’s history with biodiversity strategies

Australia had started work on a national biodiversity strategy even before the CBD was signed. In fact, in his 1989 Environment Statement, Our Country, Our Future, Prime Minister Hawke made commitments, not just to develop a national biodiversity strategy, but for Australia to play a leading role in what would become the CBD. In marketing terms, we weren’t just ‘early adopters’ in biodiversity policy, we were ‘innovators’.

As they say in the classics, it’s been all downhill from there. The strategy was ready in 1993 but languished when it proved difficult to get the states on board. It was eventually adopted by all Australian governments in 1995, under the title National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia’s Biological Diversity. It’s most significant measures were a national commitment to undertake bioregional planning and a target of arresting and reversing the decline of native vegetation by 2000. The strategy also had major flaws, setting the unfortunate precedent of being adopted without new resourcing, on the basis that many of its measures fell within the scope of existing programs.

There was a change of government federally soon after the strategy was adopted and incoming environment minister Robert Hill worked hard, but with limited success, to give it life. He included provisions for bioregional planning in Australia’s new national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, but these have barely been used. Later, following a five year review of the strategy, he would develop ‘national objectives and targets’, including an objective of halting land clearing, and seek to incorporate these into bilateral agreements with states under the National Heritage Trust, a major funding program. Despite some success, state resistance was ultimately too great to deliver much of significance.

In 2009 another environment minister, Peter Garrett, succeeded in getting a new strategy (the 2010 strategy) endorsed, including 10 ambitious national targets for 2015. In their foreword to the 2010 strategy, ministers noted that despite much effort, biodiversity continued to decline and, as a result, ‘we need to take immediate and sustained action to conserve biodiversity.’

In fact, the problem was so serious that ‘business as usual is no longer an option’. Despite these strong words, most of the 2015 targets were not met (or could not be measured) and I suspect this was the real reason why environment ministers decided to replace the 2010 strategy early: to make the strong language and unmeasurable targets disappear.

A ‘zero emissions vehicle’ for the wrong reasons

Now governments are taking a new tack. Strong warnings and ambitious targets have been replaced by an exhortation that we all work together. The new strategy is sold as an ‘overarching framework’ and is said not only to ‘set the framework for local, state/territory and federal government actions’, but also to ‘help those outside government identify where they can contribute to support national areas of focus’.

I see this as code for ‘all care but no responsibility’: government will identify the problem and the point to both solutions and ways to measure progress, but without specifying any actual strategies in the document. As a result, if ‘those outside government’ (ie, you and me) want to halt the relentless decline of biodiversity it Australia, we will have to do it ourselves, as none of our governments have seen the need to announce any new measures to support this new ‘strategy’.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that Australia’s Nature Strategy has been produced only to comply with the CBD. It’s a ‘compliance model’ and if I were its owner I’d follow GM’s recipe by recalling it and sending it to the crusher. The difference is that I would be doing this, not because its success threatens business, but because its likely failure threatens business (and everything else that depends on biodiversity). This is a ‘zero emissions vehicle’, not because it is propelled by the latest technology, but because it only works if self-propelled. Fred Flintstone would feel right at home in it.

*Killing the electric car: if you’d like to know more about the EV1, it was the subject of a 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?

Image by David Zapata from Pixabay