Evaluating Australian drought policy from the perspective of good-practice strategic policymaking

ABSTRACT The sustainable management of Australia’s natural resources has increasingly attracted policy interventions by the Australian government. Drought policy represents one sector where the Australian government is a signatory to sustainable use of natural resources, cognisant of the nexus between agricultural production practices and environmental condition. A strategic sustainability policy evaluation framework is applied to drought policy to analyse policy design and process relationships with a view to informing improvements in these policy facets. The analysis finds that at the national level, the nature of the policy problem is inadequately defined, giving rise to generic objectives and overly narrow policy instrument choices that are inconsistent with the complex nature of drought and resilience objectives. Policy instrument choice is focussed on farm financial viability, with simplistic correlations drawn between farm profitability and improved social and environmental wellbeing. The appetite for broader structural reforms to agricultural and rural community development are lacking politically and by industry, but necessary given emerging social, economic and environmental challenges to agriculture. Structural reforms will be inevitable if the complexities between production and sustainable natural resource management are to be reconciled. More systemic and nuanced understandings of resilience and drought risk are needed to deliver on the policy ambition of drought resilience.