Regulatory design for water quality management in Perth, Western Australia

The executive summary is divided into seven sections (including the Introduction). In Section 2, we argue that voluntarism, which has been the preferred policy approach for some decades, is singularly unlikely to provide an adequate policy response for a variety of well-documented reasons. The following sections address three of the most serious environmental challenges water quality: non-point source pollution from agriculture (Section 3), pollution caused by intensive agriculture – particularly in the Peel Harvey (Section 4), and pollution caused by light industry (Section 5). In Section 6, we examine some innovative roles for economic instruments in providing policy solutions to water pollution problems, and in Section 7 the importance of community-based approaches and of Integrated Catchment Management.