From Bob Cotgrove, University of Tasmania
Brian Adams’s scheme for resolving planning disputes raises more questions
than it answers
(Forum, 18 July, p 50). His answer to the difficulties of
quantifying non-marketed environmental services in social cost-benefit analyses
is to divide “concepts” into two arbitrary (and by no means mutually exclusive
or exhaustive) classes: “tangible” and “intangible”.
Under his scheme the tangibles would be given the standard monetary cost
assessment, while the intangibles would be collectively ranked and scored by “a
team chosen for its knowledge of relevant factors”.
Ay, there’s the rub! Who chooses the team, on what criteria, and in pursuit
of what hidden agenda? Presumably, Adams would be upset if the team were biased
towards those with a vested interest in commercial “progress”, just as others
would object to a team made up of “anti-development” Greenies. Cost-benefit
analysis was developed precisely to avoid people’s dissatisfaction with this
arbitrary, “winner takes all” process.
The legitimate quest by environmental economists to value, in monetary terms,
society’s willingness to pay for trade-offs between natural capital assets and
manufactured assets represents a new and honourable attempt to move the planning
process away from old-fashioned “top-down” decisions by those in power to a more
consensual “bottom-up” assessment of society’s preferences.
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Bringing environmental and other non-marketed costs and benefits into the
calculus of decision-making offers greater hope for achieving sustainable
development than the traditional process of deferring decisions to the arbitrary
judgments of those in power, with vested interests to protect. It also opens the
door to more radical solutions, rather than the simple “Road A versus Road B”
scenario—options such as adopting electronic road-pricing measures to
ration a town’s scarce road space during peak periods so as to obviate the need
for either of the road proposals.
Incorporating non-marketed goods and services into valuation assessments, if
done properly, can satisfy society’s willingness to pay for improvements in both
quality of life and material standard of living.
