Towards Sustainable Pastoralism in Australia's Rangelands

The Australian rangelands are spatially complex, variable to the point where reactions to disturbance are often unpredictable, and generally uneconomic to rehabilitate once damaged. Hence some areas of the rangelands are inherently prone to degradation through management mistakes. Further, economically optimum short-term stocking rates are often well above what the environment seems able to tolerate in the long-term. Because pastoralists rationally discount future production, it pays them to graze heavily; bur this is ultimately an institutional problem, not the fault of the pastoralists. In this article, we outline an approach to identifying regions that should be resilient under grazing and where pastoralism may be sustainable due to sufficiently dependable productivity and profitability. We suggest that if grazing is not phased out as a primary land use in non-resilient regions, then they will continue to experience serious decline. We argue that policy paralysis has come about because of the false assumption (in practice if not rhetoric) that the problems of one region are the same as those of another. Management would improve if governments engineered policies to give private enterprise freedom to pursue profit in resilient environments, and to provide for greater public management in regions where unreasonable levels of altruism are required to meet the goal of sustainable land use.