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Are we ready to embrace stewardship?

A general ‘duty of care’ responsibility not to degrade environmental quality now underpins most legislation in Australia and New Zealand. However, codification remains problematic and application to all industries and communities of place and interest abounds in exclusions and circumstantial exceptions created through legislation or court rulings. Our societies accept these apparent inequities, at times begrudgingly, in support of our democratic process and the responsiveness of our elected representatives to community concerns. The focus of this editorial is the emergence of a parallel phenomenon of voluntary individual and community environmental activity, which might be captured by the term ‘stewardship’. The apparent altruistic act of being concerned or caring for open access areas, or for someone else’s property or interests, is not unusual. Farmers have long kept ‘conservation areas’ from economic production use; perhaps for personal enjoyment and sense of satisfaction as much as altruism and, ultimately, these areas also serve the interests of wildlife ‘owned’ by government. This alone creates debates about payment for environmental services (Patrick et al. 2009; Bennett 2011), which will possibly intensify as mechanisms for carbon off-setting become more common and are expanded. Similarly, at the corporate level, environmental best practice and corporate social responsibility might be seen as a move towards a stewardship ethic and part of a social licence to operate. At the community level in Australia, the Landcare and CoastCare movements and Indigenous rangers rely heavily on volunteerism to deliver desired environmental protection and enhancement outcomes, with essential government support. However, Robins and Kanowski (2011) have challenged the sagacity of recent changes to Australia’s regional natural resource management under the Caring for our Country program, and suggest that these might undermine the goodwill and community support for stewardship that previous programs were developing. Meanwhile, government managers of one of the last remaining great commons the world’s oceans and seas are increasingly aware that command and control and allocation mechanisms will not be sufficient to ensure the sustainability of fisheries and resource conservation. It is in this area, without tenure boundaries beyond 200 nautical miles off coasts, and with limitless access and surveillance difficulties, that the stewardship concept is pursued overtly with industry and, more passively, through community education. While successful models apparently exist (e.g. Marine Stewardship Council), their sustainability might be fragile when regulating organisations presume and over-rely on community and industry goodwill. In all of these instances, stewardship demands forms of partnership between regulators or property owners and the stewards. Partnerships are forged when: the ‘corporate’ environment is right; equity, but not equality necessarily, is assured; and Australasian Journal of Environmental Management Vol. 19, No. 4, December 2012, 207 212