Farmers’ Varying Economic, Environmental and Social Values and Attitudes as Barriers to Water Reform

This paper explores how the importance that farmers place on the dimensions of land, water, profit, family, community, and lifestyle affects their decision-making in response to the current generation of Australian water policies. Using factor analysis we identify and describe three value and attitude constructs: Succession, Caretaking, and Commerce and show how these can help to explain farmers’ decision-making. These value-constructs might help when designing and communicating new environmental policies so that farmers’ management responses will be more in line with policy expectations and thereby potentially reduce unwanted environmental, social and economic impacts of policies designed to address environmental and climate change issues.