‘Feel-good’ green goals not enough
There is widespread evidence of the deteriorating quality of New Zealand’s natural environment. Many factors contribute to this, but one that has received surprisingly little attention is the lack of government transparency and accountability for environmental management.
Compared with the high levels of openness in how governments manage the public finances and monetary policy, the arrangements for environmental stewardship are weak.
Of course, environmental outcomes result from the complex interplay of natural processes, human activities, and central, regional and local government actions, and cannot be managed in the same way that a government can manage its finances. Nevertheless, there is an urgent need to apply a comparable underlying framework of transparency and accountability.
Start with ‘‘state of the nation’’ environmental reporting. Only in 2015 was a law passed requiring central government to publish regular, technically independent reports on the state of the environment. The Environmental Reporting Act requires the Ministry for the Environment and Statistics NZ to publish a report on one of five domains (land, air, fresh water, marine, and atmosphere and climate) every six months, and a synthesis report every three years.
But there are numerous weaknesses in the act when judged against international good practice for environmental reporting. The act should be amended to require reports to cover the underlying drivers of environmental outcomes (to help formulate responses); breakdowns of data by regional and local authority area to reveal where problems are greatest and promote accountability for regulation under the Resource Management Act; forward-looking data on risks and outlooks to identify priorities; the effectiveness of government policies to date, to improve cost-effectiveness; and a requirement for the government to respond to each synthesis report stating its assessment, priority environmental outcomes with strategies, targets and milestones, and progress reports.
In addition, there should be a requirement for the three-yearly synthesis report to be published within a certain number of months of each general election, to promote a much better informed public debate over the state of the environment trade-offs with other policy goals such as economic growth, and stronger accountability of the government to the electorate.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment could also be invited to indicate, in commentary on each synthesis report, the critical few outcomes for priority government action, based on transparent criteria and reasoning. This would help to inject independent professional judgment into the public debate, and to focus resources on priorities, while leaving the final decisions with the government.
At the moment, governments get away with long-term ‘‘feel good’’ goals, such as ‘‘predator-free by 2050’’, without the discipline that comes from being required to publish details of the intended path to the goal and what they are doing now to promote its achievement.
The announced Carbon Zero Bill would set up just this sort of framework with respect to climate change. But (with the exception of fisheries management) it is lacking at central government level for ‘‘domestic’’ environmental outcomes – the outcomes for which we alone as a country are responsible, such as the declining quality of our fresh water or the loss of our unique indigenous biodiversity.
Finally, environmental policies need to be integrated more effectively into overall government strategy and the annual budget – the government’s single most important statement of its strategies and priorities. If environmental goals and targets are to mean anything, they need to be linked not just to long-term goals, but also to government tax and spending policies in the next 1-3 years.
So, a final proposal is to introduce a new chapter on ‘‘Fiscal Policy and the Environment’’ in the Fiscal Strategy Report in each Budget. The chapter would discuss recent progress on the government’s priority environmental outcomes, information on risks and outlooks, and discussion of the impacts of fiscal policies on the environment, eg, ‘‘green taxes’’, spending on environmental protection, and funding for environmental monitoring, evaluation, research and regulation.
This would help give effect to the Government’s announcement that the
2019 Budget will be a ‘‘wellbeing budget’’.
Taken together, these proposals are ambitious, although changes to the Environmental Reporting Act could be phased in. They are intended to provide a comprehensive framework to guide what may otherwise be disparate and ad hoc steps towards better environmental stewardship. Significant investments would be required in essential environmental monitoring and research infrastructure, an infrastructure that is currently underresourced even to fulfil its current functions.
The proposals are based on commitments in law to transparency of goals, targets and milestones, and systematic monitoring, reporting and accountability – the familiar tools of public management since the fundamental reforms of the 1980s and
1990s.
Applying these tools to environmental stewardship is likely to be a key change required if we are to begin to turn around the long-term decline in the state of our environment.
●➤ Murray Petrie is Senior Research Associate, Institute of Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University, and Lead Technical Adviser, the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency.