بهبود تصمیم گیری های زیست محیطی:داستان هزینه معاملات

A multidisciplinary team of researchers made efforts to influence the design and implementation of environmental policy in Australia. A focus of these efforts was the development of the Investment Framework for Environmental Resources (INFFER). In addition, the team undertook a range of communication activities, training, user support, and participation in committees and enquiries. Transaction costs were relevant to these efforts in a variety of ways. Environmental managers perceived INFFER to involve relatively high transaction costs. A balance was struck between the system having simplicity (and low transaction costs) and delivering environmental benefits. Transaction costs were factored into the planning and prioritisation processes developed. For example, public and private transaction costs are accounted for in the calculation of benefit:cost ratios and in the choice of policy mechanisms. There are diverse roles that transaction costs play in the processes of developing, implementing and influencing environmental policy programmes. A key observation is that appropriate strategic investment in transaction costs can improve decisions and increase net benefits from an environmental programme. A well-designed decision process can involve incurring transaction costs at one stage in order to save transaction costs at a later stage.

In 2000, the Australian government announced a new environmental programme, the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality (Anonymous, 2000). The stated goal of the programme was “to motivate and enable regional communities to use coordinated and targeted action to: prevent, stabilise and reverse trends in dryland salinity affecting the sustainability of production, the conservation of biological diversity and the viability of our infrastructure; improve water quality and secure reliable allocations for human uses, industry and the environment” (Anonymous, 2000, p. 5). The programme provided A$1.4 billion for expenditure largely on extension services to farmers and financial support for salinity management by farmers, various organisations and government departments (Pannell and Roberts, 2010). Soil salinisation, especially of non-irrigated land, was recognised as a serious and costly problem affecting millions of hectares of agricultural land, native vegetation, physical infrastructure (especially roads) and water quality in important catchments (George et al., 1997, Ghassemi et al., 1995 and Pannell, 2001a). These impacts, and predictions that they would increase dramatically in coming decades (e.g. Murray Darling Basin Ministerial Council, 1999 and National Land and Water Resources Audit, 2001), were the subject of intense media coverage and debate at the time (e.g. Beresford et al., 2001), providing the impetus for the establishment of the National Action Plan. 1

There is a great deal of research related to planning and prioritisation of environmental projects. Within this body of work, the INFFER project is relatively unusual in the prominent focus given to transaction costs. This is likely to be because the project is not solely a research project, but includes a focus on influencing real policy and investment decisions, with strong participation by users who wish to use the framework in an institutional environment that is characterised by high transaction costs. From the earliest origins of the project, when the researchers were responding to weaknesses in a national salinity programme, discussions with stakeholders about improvements to planning and prioritisation processes have featured transaction costs as a key consideration. Given the focus of the work on influencing real-world outcomes, the researchers found that dealing well with transaction cost issues was an inescapable requirement. We concur with the observation of McCann et al. (2005) that “by ignoring important costs, which are obvious to the agencies involved, the economics profession is less credible” (p. 527–529). Ironically, a consequence was that the research team incurred unusually high transaction costs associated with communications, training, and so on.