Participatory environmental management in NSW: policy and practice

The heightened awareness and concern for environmental issues in Australia has been primarily centred in urban communities, stimulated by both local issues, such as the logging of old-growth forests, and global concerns, such as the greenhouse effect and ozone deterioration. The degradation of rural lands has occupied a relatively marginal position on the environmental agenda. More recently, however, it has gained more political and community attention. The massive extent of land degradation has been recognised for a number of years but the magnitude of problems continues to increase. Major disasters, such as extensive dryland salinity in Western Australia and irrigation salinity in Victoria, have stimulated urban and rural attention. These community concerns have prompted a political response that has seen rural environmental issues become Jess marginalised and more politically focused. Recently, the NSW government has begun implementation of Total Catchment Management (TCM) and has supported the federal Landcare program. These programs attempt, using a coordinated, participatory approach, to address rural environmental issues. This chapter discusses the NSW natural resource management policy (in terms of TCM and Landcare) and attempts to identify those areas of practice that are prob-lematic and contradictory in light of policy that espouses a participatory approach to rural environmental management. Implementation of TCM and Landcare are at early stages and the fluidity of events along with the current heterogeneity of government practice allows only preliminary generalisations to be drawn. We argue that examples of contradictory practice emerge from an ideologically distorted view of what participation means within a framework of economic rationalisatio