2004 FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

Speakers
Questions/discussion

I am going to give my impressions of the day's proceedings, then I will invite each of today's 10 speakers to make one or two points. Then there will be time for discussion.

First, in terms of my impressions of the day's proceedings, it was suggested in the opening session, and I think some of what we have heard since has confirmed the view, that the debate is bedevilled by cognitive blind spots and biases which we all have. And it is made more difficult by the fact that the logical structure of arguments is often unclear. In many cases, of course, people have a very strong incentive to make the logical structure of their argument unclear so that its intellectual shoddiness is hidden from gaze.

Each stage of the analysis requires an integrated approach, but we have heard in all the sessions, from the very first one to the last one, that integration and interdisciplinary approaches are difficult to obtain resources for and difficult to enact. They are impeded by institutional structures as well as our intellectual blind spots.

The third fundamental point I take out of today's session is that broad generalisations about the continent as a whole and population as one number are meaningless. It reminds me that in the first report on the State of the Environment we said that the serious environmental problems we face in Australia are the compound effect of population growth and its distribution, our lifestyle choices, the technologies we use and the demands on resources. The environmental effect of a given population is significantly affected by whether we are herbivores or carnivores, whether we cycle or drive urban assault vehicles and so on. So we need to take an approach which builds in all of those factors.

But the fundamental issue is, as Bob Wasson said, that there are limits on what one species can do and get away with it. Barney Foran's framework for it was that we have to reduce our physical metabolism by 30 to 50 per cent over 50 years. But Ruth Fincher reminded us that the Dovers et al. study made the obvious point, in political terms, that reducing per capita consumption is problematic. It seems to me there is some fundamental mathematics here. If the total consumption is unsustainable and population is increasing, per capita consumption has to be reduced to square the circle.

That, I think, brings us to the issue of where economics fits in to the equation. It is clear that economic analysis can be helpful and that economic tools can assist the transition to sustainability. But the fundamental issue that I think we need to discuss in this forum is whether economic growth is an end in itself or a means to an end or part of the problem. It seems to me the fundamental view you have of the role of economic growth will be significant in determining what view you come to of how we approach making the population and its demands in harmony with the natural environment.

Speakers

Richard Denniss: Let me just take off on the last point that Ian was making. The Australia Institute asked Newspoll to commission a survey of whether people thought they had enough money or not, and 60 per cent of Australians believe they can't afford to buy everything they really need, including 47 per cent, I think, of people earning over $70,000. If we think that economic growth is going to get us everything we really need, then the last 50 years of empirical evidence would appear to sit in stark contrast to that.

As I was saying in my talk before, I think economics could be very useful for the environment-population debate, but whether it is useful or not depends on the kind of economics that is used. Bad economics can lead to popular policy, and that nexus is something that is starkly apparent to me. And in terms of other disciplines, in dealing with economists and economics, I think it is a very powerful thing to get on side but you really need to try and engage with people who can help you do what you want to do, because many economists are just ignoring the problems we are here talking about today.

Ruth Fincher: I haven't got my program here so I don't think I will remember everyone's name, but the two things that have struck me as really very interesting, in what I think is a wonderful idea for a symposium, are these. First of all, I think the question of power in disciplinary perspectives and the longevity of disciplinary perspectives and the protecting of their boundaries and so on was a very interesting question that we have heard addressed through a range of talks today, from the very first one through to Graeme Hugo's discussion of institutional directives and EFTSU politics in universities, through to discussions of political will in building appropriate infrastructure in cities and so on. So I think questions of politics and power: and I think you [Richard Denniss] talked about that as well in the economics discussion: are something I would like to see us pursue, and how we work within those boundaries.

The second one that I would also like us to have pursued is the question of how we actually go about negotiating across the different disciplinary boundaries. I know in my own discipline, in geography, with the characteristics I have described, we have tried at the University of Melbourne to have the cultural and social geographers work with engineers on catchment management issues, and the cultural geographers are all interested in narratives and the power of discourse, and the engineers are interested in putting social variables into their models. So the question of how we actually negotiate those paradigm differences, as I think someone referred to them, is something I would like to us to have considered further.

Graeme Hugo: The first of the two things that would stand out for me is the real need for interdisciplinary dialogue, and real dialogue on an equal basis. I think there is still a tendency for us to be dismissive of some other disciplines, and really it should a table at which people come round as equals and there should be structures in our system to facilitate an equal discussion.

The second issue is that it has really underlined for me today that we really don't, still, understand a lot about population-environment relationships within Australia and there is a real need for more research: but, I think, a different type of research, in that we do have to do research in a multidisciplinary team rather than as individuals.

Julie Klein: I shall try to practise the Richard Denniss principle of pith and time management here, and say that for me what came through out of a very rich and crowded day is the importance of two powerful words, 'history' and 'power'.

We were reminded that the past is not relevant and becomes a tool for what we want to accomplish today. Arran Gare made that very clear in talking about the importance of an historical view of arguments. We must know the differences and that they co-exist, and be able to make intelligent choices between them. Robert Wasson underscored that in talking about how we must look at the historical record; if we don't, if it is not examined, we miss some very important components.

Ruth Fincher I thought really built a fine bridge to the second keyword, 'power', in looking at constructing the history of geography and asking us to remember that the form of a research question leads to certain answers rather than others, and the way in which a question is formulated has a great deal to do with how we conceive of knowledge and whether or not there are resistances to it. In that respect she built the bridge to power, because power has very much to do with who controls the impression of a discipline, who controls debate. And resistance to certain constructions of a discipline can be a powerful form of cognitive blind spots, to echo Paul Monk.

There was a questioner in the philosophy session who said we need to be conscious of how power controls paradigms. The moderator of the economics session underscored that too, in saying that we ignore economics at our own risk. And, as Richard Denniss said, there is a very noisy minority in economics and we must understand that there are counter-constructions of economics. Ignorance of those becomes a blind spot.

The disciplines, Glenn Withers also reminded us, are very heterogeneous species. He spoke about subdisciplines that actually dispel a number of myths that circulate about what economics has to say or do. And my nomination for the quote of the day is Glenn Withers' remark, 'We need full integrative systems approaches that are mergers, not takeovers.'

However, we were brought back to a sobering reality by Graeme Hugo, who said that there are persistent barriers in the midst, even, of optimism: silos, opposing tensions in the system, the political economy of education and research, ironically though at a time when geography has data that is so powerful and new ways of representing it. So there can be a contribution but there are constraints that are larger than any one discipline.

Arran Gare: The point that interested me most was Julie Klein talking about transdisciplinary work, and the difference between that and multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work, talking about the fragmentation of disciplines. There are so many different disciplines and the problem of bringing them together. And it is not just a matter of bringing them together, it is getting them to be able to understand each other. Some fairly creative work needs to be done on that.

I think it is interesting, looking at the geographers, that in one of the disciplines that do try to bridge this gap between the natural sciences and the human sciences you have got this divide between physical geography and human geography. They are going their separate paths. It seems to me really problematic. It is part institutional and I suspect it is also a theoretical failure.

It interested me that Glenn Withers rejected the concentric circle model for relating different disciplines and talked about the three-legged stool model, which is really defensive multidisciplinary rather than an effort to really engage disciplines in relationship to each other and to put them in perspective.

Paul Monk: There are many points that could be made. Rather than trying to summarise all the interesting observations that were made, I would like to leave you with three or four points.

The first is that it seems to me a fundamental problem we have got is complexity. We are interesting animals but comparatively simple, and collectively we have generated enormously complex challenges for ourselves. And all the disciplines are a different take on that.

Secondly, as I sought to emphasise this morning, one thing that we would do well to recognise is that we have brains that have evolved particular strengths in the visuo-spatial domain and we put an enormous burden on them by using cumbersome, abstract systems without stopping to reflect on how that slows us down. So visuo-graphic devices and diagramming, well used, and making argument explicit is going to help us, whatever discipline we are working in and across disciplines.

If there is one more point that I would add, it is that it seemed to me that the observation that Cliff Hooker made about the need for robust adaptive strategies is spot on. The whole capacity to be adaptive, and at a deep level to be able to learn, must be built in to the way we collaborate with one another. There is too much of a tendency to get dug in to particular positions and entrenched, and instead of learning we are focusing on trying to batter somebody else over the head.

Glenn Withers: Colin Butler commented in his overview that economics had been unable to advance environmental issues except at the margin. Of course, to an economist that is the ultimate accolade, as the science of marginal analysis.

I think what we have done as economists, however, is advance conservation approaches to policy via weaning the conservation movement off punitive moralising through regulatory interventions that inevitably are undermined, towards more social-market mechanisms such as carbon taxes, environmental levies, emissions trading and the like, where instead of steering you try and row with the system. And that has been a big improvement.

Now, let me, as it were, abstract from that and think what we can do about the problem of interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity. It seems to me there are similar instruments we could use there, and given that Graeme Hugo is here, it seems that at the ARC level, for instance, a 5 per cent levy across all disciplinary grants, to be put into an interdisciplinary pool, would be a nice start. And if each discipline can't come up with 5 per cent of its people who are actually interested in participating in interdisciplinary activity, we have made our point rather dramatically.

Similarly, within the universities it doesn't seem to me impossible, for instance, to conceive of a PhD bonus for panels of supervisors from three disciplines, to supervise candidates, and you get a 30 per cent loading on the grant for the PhD scholarship to be divided amongst the various disciplines that contribute to that. A few thoughts along those lines, I think, might well start to put in place some social-market mechanisms that might move us in the right direction.

Ian Lowe (Chair): Thanks, Glenn. At one stage I was proud of the fact that I was co-supervising PhD students with every other faculty at Griffith University, but it was then pointed out to me that this was antisocial behaviour because it was transferring EFTSUs elsewhere, and it was actively discouraged.

Cliff Hooker: Bring on the Withers incentive. It gets harder and harder in a linear process; you are boxed into a narrow file.

Two remarks. One, the more I hear people talk about the external impediments, the pragmatic impediments to true transdisciplinary work, the more I want to emphasise the fact that, even so, integration is hard. And if we won't tackle the detailed methodologies, all the rest of it won't help. Conversely as well.

As for the other stuff, I was reflecting: we have a whole bunch of tools which are useful but can get out of hand. Everyone thinks economics has got out of hand; I am more or less on Withers' side that it is useful more than it is out of hand. But every tool has its limits.

The one tool that is missing from this whole conference is institutional design. There is no point in knowing about power unless you know how to move it and wield it through the institutions we create, but we are not talking about them. No-one is talking about institutional design.

Barney Foran: I guess two comments, really: I will say from the environmental science point of view, but it has come up many times, that physical reality is something you can't get past. We talk about thermodynamic limits and all that sort of thing, but I think this bridges onto my second point. When you get in there and do the hard yards and the data integration and all those sorts of things that people say can't be done but are being done, you actually run into unpopular outcomes.

So my third point is that I think nationally and also within our disciplines we have a collective myopia, perhaps enforced by our wish to be patted on the head, in that we can only come up with good news. In some of our work, from the environmental science point of view, it is hard to find the good news. I look forward to the philosophical churn that we undergo tomorrow, because I think I too need a way forward in this very difficult and challenging area.

Robert Wasson: A couple of quick remarks. One, interdisciplinarity, in the words of a colleague of mine, Steve Dovers, is that which transforms to some degree each of the disciplines engaged in it. I find that a very powerful definition, and a very useful one. That is what this debate and many others in environmental issues, and indeed all important issues in humanity, are actually about.

Glenn Withers' very clever attempt: and he is very clever, to use the word in the pejorative sense: to keep criticism from economists under control by adopting the moral high ground and telling us to stop sniping is, to me, a worrying development, because interdisciplinarity requires each of the disciplines involved to transform the other. No, don't snipe; I agree with Glenn entirely on that. Sniping isn't helpful. But we have to listen to each other and be prepared to change.

My second point is about learning and adaptation, and the comment that has just been made about institutional design. We are learning creatures: you may not believe it, but we are: and we are actually adaptive. The sort of intellectual work on that subject that I think is required is actually quite tough.

A student of mine is currently finishing a PhD thesis where she is looking at the dryland salinity and irrigation salinity systems in the Murrumbidgee Valley: in which we are sitting: and she is looking at policy learning, she is looking at the environmental history of this system and she is modelling the system using a system dynamics perspective. That is coming from one person who is trained as a historian. She has internalised what I have talked about in terms of interdisciplinarity. It is an astonishing piece of work which I hope will see the light of day quite soon.

My final point – if you don't think that we are part of the environment and that the environment surrounds us, consider this. In 100 million years' time, our civilisation will be a millimetre-thick layer of heavy metals.

Questions/discussion

Rosh Ireland: I do environmental policy with the government of Western Australia. One of the observations I would make about the various sessions that have gone on today is that there has been a fair bit of criticism of the simplifications and the axioms and the simple targets and numbers that have been used in the past or that have been put forward, and there was a lot of talk about the complexity and difficulty of putting all the different pieces together. But we heard from the gentleman from South Australia about their government having just very recently chosen a number: 30 per cent: for increase in population...[inaudible]. So the question is: where are a better set of simplifications, of guiding targets or notions going to come from?

Barney Foran: It is good that that one came up again, because I thought I didn't answer it well enough when it was asked of me. My second answer to it is that, if that is the case, +25 or +50 per cent by the year 2050, I guess what science particularly can do is then to place the sorts of trajectories that you have to do with your urban planning, with your car fleet, with your water, with your agricultural soils and so on, that you have to meet if you want to stabilise and then reduce your environmental impact. Science can do that fairly well, and I think that is a way forward.

In another life, when we tested out the population as 25 million for Australia, we found that that is a do-able target but it is not without its environmental impacts, even with rapid advances of technology. So we have still got this Rubik's Cube, as I used to call it, a really difficult balancing of what policy makers want to do: the more people for the taps, tiles and tubs economy: as opposed to the real innovation that has to happen with the motors and the flows and all those little cogs and wheels that actually make the physical economy run.

Paul Monk: I think it was Albert Einstein who remarked that any fool can take what is simple and make it seem complex, but it takes real genius to take the complex and make it look simple. It seems to me we need a little more of that genius in various fields, so that those people who really do have the detailed discipline knowledge can present a clear, simple, and, as far as possible, not distorted statement to people who make policy. So the dialogue between the two needs to operate at that level, rather than projecting complex stuff at them and getting frustrated when they cannot absorb it or do not make policy based on what you think they should.

We do need institutional design. Earlier today, in talking to Richard Denniss, I raised this question of Stalin and forced collectivisation. There was catastrophic institutional design there. The Bolshevik party was so badly designed that they couldn't fend off Stalin from doing what he did. We are not so badly off, but manifestly we have institutional problems in getting good policy formulated. So we need to look closely at that: what learning processes at the institutional, accountability and review levels will best enable us to get what is complex channelled to where it needs to be learned and then turned into policy?

Glenn Withers: I think a simple number is actually very important. Four of us in this room were involved in a committee of inquiry for Bob Hawke on population and Australia's future, and we agreed with the intellectual case that a number was not sustainable, as it were, that it would mislead, inevitably it would change with technology, behaviour and characteristics of the population et cetera. So we ended up not even putting a number forward as to an appropriate target, let's say, for Australia's population. What that meant was that the bureaucracy just did nothing. The status quo prevailed, we muddled through afterwards.

If you give even the wrong number, you are engaging the issue. You are opening it up to debate and discussion. One of the difficulties is which is the right number, but I would actually come round to the position now that any number is a good start, because extreme numbers are not going to get up and reasonable numbers, within a reasonable range, are going to open up the sorts of discussions we are having here today, instead of allowing the bureaucracy to bury the whole issue because it is all too hard.

Ian Lowe (Chair): It has been said that there are three types of bureaucrats: those who understand numbers and those who don't.

Richard Denniss: I would just take up where Glenn left off. I think the question is a really interesting one. Decisions will be made, policies are getting made and numbers will have an impact on them. Economists' comparative advantage over the rest of the disciplines is probably a willingness, as opposed to an ability, to come up with 'a' number and to speak confidently about it. If you don't believe me, look at the news tonight and look at people talking about what any variable will be in a month's time, and they'll be wrong. But they'll be back on the news tomorrow night. We simultaneously mock climate scientists for not having enough precision in their forecasts of what the weather is going to be in 50 years' time. Numbers influence policy. Economists are good at making up numbers.

Alan Jones: I will declare my position as an ecologist, a person who is concerned about the wellbeing of humans: as I think should be one of our fundamental goals, but we don't really talk very much about where we want to get to, even today: and, secondly, concerned about the wellbeing of future humans and also the wellbeing of nature. So there is a range of goals that I am concerned about.

I guess I see the numbers of humans, both on the planet and in Australia, as one of the major underlying drivers that provide a threat to the achievement of those sorts of goals. They are not only my goals; they are public goals, they are goals of ESD, stated by the Council of Australian Governments.

One of the things I find frustrating: and there are, perhaps, reasons why this should be: is that we don't often, it seems, have agreed knowledge bases, some underlying facts, if you like to call them that, even though they may be arguable and qualified. We often don't have things we can agree on which are an important basis. Professor Withers talked about immigration and some of the myths attached to immigration. I am not an economist, so I am not particularly well informed on this matter, but I wonder about one of the myths, stated in various places, that immigration provides benefits to our economy. Now, is this so? I am not sure. We should agree on this. Does it provide benefits to our economy on a per capita basis, given that with more immigration there will be more people? I think that is an underlying important thing, because we need to decide whether we want more immigrants, and what the reasons are for it.

If it does provide benefits to the economy, especially on a per capita basis, does this take into account the larger wellbeing of people? We look at people living in Sydney, for example: Richard Denniss will probably have something to say about that. Does it take into account the footprint of each Australian, which may be as much as about nine hectares? And is it sustainable? So we are talking about long-term benefits.

Glenn Withers: The particular consensus-type arguments that are used are, I think, largely disproving arguments for substantial disbenefit, of a strictly economic kind. That is fairly much agreed. Once you start moving into broader benefits, as you begin to define them sequentially, you get increasingly less agreement. One, you are moving away from easily measurable analysis, you are moving into hard-to-quantify things like wellbeing. But even on things like per capita GDP you will get more disagreement among economists on those benefits than on whether it causes unemployment. So there is an increasing spectrum, as it were, of decreasing knowledge as you move increasingly: pardon the contradictions: into the area that you are specifying.

One of those, if I could just add one point, is that that increasing uncertainty is an illustration of what is wrong with economics in general- not the particular prejudices and biases or idiocies of economists, but rather the difficulty of defining systems well. As you define the system more broadly, as in any discipline you are getting beyond your narrow area of expertise into much more speculative, hard to control, hard to measure, hard to analyse notions and arrangements. And that is the same as you broaden that notion of benefit: then it is increasingly contestable: into things that the market does not measure easily or well, into things that the market only measures partially or not at all, and to system effects that may well have switchpoints and serious problems, including, for instance, spillovers to innovation. It is very hard to measure the benefits of a larger population in generating new ideas, particularly incremental process improvements and small gains and the like, but we have to keep at it and keep trying. But I would like to keep trying within a broader framework as well, to help us avoid the bias of our own discipline.

Alan Jones: Does that include footprint analysis by economists?

Glenn Withers: Well, again you have got to unpack what a footprint analysis means. In so far as it is starting to extend into biodiversity as part of the footprint analysis, as opposed to simple resource use of minerals, answer no for biodiversity, answer yes for resource use.

Richard Denniss: Glenn made a very good point, the last point he made in his paper earlier, about certain things being contingent on other things. As an economist I have no expertise as to whether we should have a bigger or smaller population, but what I would be asking for if I were a non-economist would simply be to make sure that governments put policies in place so we can use well the water we have currently got, before they are willing to entertain a large population increase. Or that you want to do something about carbon dioxide emissions before you talk about an increase. I think you have to get these decisions in order, if you know what I mean, but often we can make it too complex.

Bob Douglas: I am struck, in the whole debate this afternoon, by the institutional issue, both at the academic level and at the political and administrative level, and I was very impressed with Glenn's rather slick response to the academic one by using incentives. I wonder whether the economists have got any quick-and-dirty ways of responding to the institutional silo problem that it seems to me is absolutely central to our addressing these issues at governmental level and at the political level.

Richard Denniss: I would say that we need national sustainability policy, in the way that we had the much-talked-about national competition policy. If we set out what our national objective was: that is, define sustainability in an implementable way and then set out to ask each department to come up with 10 things to do to achieve it: we will be a lot closer to it in 15 years' time than if we don't do that. We actually have to set a goal and try and achieve it. Simply sitting back and hoping that markets will come up with the right goal for us I don't think has any chance of succeeding.

Glenn Withers: If you could convince Ian Chubb tomorrow to fund the Policy and Governance Division of the ANU, the public policy area, a lot more, I am no longer an economist, I'm a Public Policy Professor. But what we do is we are part of the marginalised transdisciplinarity minority. We try and integrate political science, law, philosophy, economics et cetera, and we are treated like the margin that in fact we are, compared with conventional disciplines with thousands of undergraduates et cetera.

The breakthrough that that perhaps self-serving remark makes is that you can't progress policy unless you understand all the contributions that come from a range of areas and can bring them together holistically, because that is the level the politicians operate at. But not only, as it were, morally and on a merit basis, you have got to understand the way those conniving devils operate. And so you have got to be able to also suggest how you progress this through the institutions within which policy is made.

You have got to think about things like: how do you develop champions, how do you access the media, how do you develop partnerships and platforms, how do you get this onto the agenda of politicians to make them think of it seriously, in a holistic way, backed by research-based knowledge? And that translation of academic knowledge to hit the politicians is something we in the university shy away from, don't like and won't support, because it's sort of a bit dirty.

Cliff Hooker: I think this area: after all, I raised the problem as a serious study: is a good example of the usefulness and limitations of economics. Amongst all the disciplines up here, economists have been the only people willing to systematically make institutional changes. They, for example, have been willing to create property rights to make things possible. They have been willing to create incentive structures, based on existing property rights, to make things possible. The limitation is that in economics that is all you can do. You can create property rights and you can create incentives based on those rights, and it is characteristic, then, that the property rights within a university are very narrow in base: namely, money. That's it.

So my challenge to the other disciplines is this. Designing institutions is non-trivial. Our institutions have 'growed' like Topsy, historically, and we now have political governance working on incredibly simple levers that are supposed to run a complex world. A Martian looking at this would say, 'These people are children. They have no conception of how to design governance systems as complex as the world that they have built.' So what are the rest of the disciplines seriously going to do about a theory of institutional design and process? Don't just talk about it. Don't talk about power, that's vague stuff. Actually tell us what governance looks like in the next century.

Paul Monk: There has been a lot of talk about economics in the course of the day, and I think it intersects with the question of institutional design in this respect particularly. This remark comes from, I think, a newspaper story about National Australia Bank, with its recent self-inflicted problems. Somebody remarked, 'Look, the problem with those options traders is that they were put in a situation where their incentives were to do what turned out': unsurprisingly, in fact: 'to be disastrous.' And so they said, 'If you don't want the rats to go down a certain path, don't put the cheese there.'

Economics works on those elementary types of insights, at the end of the day. We complain a lot about people doing various things, including our politicians, but the reality is that institutional structures provide certain types of incentives and we should not be at all surprised if, by default, most of the time, people work according to those incentives. If you want to shift it, as sophisticated economics has done in the last half century, you look at how can you: sometimes quite subtly: shift the incentives, and lo and behold! you get different behaviour, rather than trying to get control and regulate things and punish people for doing things which they will keep doing anyway, with those incentives, so you are just kicking against the pricks.

So I think in fact a good deal of: by any other name: marginal utility analysis will get us a long way in looking at institutions.

Bill Rourke: I am an engineer and economist and have had about 45 years in the Navy. I mention that last bit because several people have said that the numbers we might need in future might depend on our ability to stand up to others who want to come in here.

I was just going to suggest that perhaps there is a need for a different approach. It could well be a good thing to say, 'This is what you would have to do, Australia, if you wanted to maintain a population of 30 million. This is what you would have to do, Australia, if you wanted to maintain a population of 40 million.' And then again perhaps 50 million. Pick a number of appropriate steps, pick an appropriate time and point out what would need to be done in order to achieve that, and compare the merits or demerits of one solution with those of another. At least I think that would help everybody look at the way we should be going.

Julie Klein: Just one comment: I would put back together two things that got separated there. Institutional structures have a great deal to do with organisations and management of organisations, and the forms that organisations take. But institutional structure is intimately entwined with the question of power, how those forms get shaped or not.