Procedures for endorsing environmentally friendly and environmentally
preferable food fibre and durable goods production, attractively identified with a
‘clean, green, caring’ logo, are appealing and effective providedthere is an official
commitment to establish a publicly funded testing, registration and regulative
service for monitoring such a process.
Finally, in addition to all the precepts of worthiness and goodness which under-
score the waste disposal management theme, lies an emphatic case for ‘enlight-
ened self-interest’. This is that agricultural products, along with certain consumer
durables produced from a ‘clean, green and caring’ environment, makes good
business sense, especially for tourism within a generally over-populated and en-
vironmentally damaged global context.Growth Pattern Policy Directions
It is open to any public authority or agency to:- Commission studies and provide promotional information useful to develop-
ers, conservationists, statutory undertakers and utility and social service
providers. - Lay on education and training seminars and services for constituent local gov-
ernment agencies, utility and service providers, and for businesses. - Provide a brokerage service to initiate development and/or conservation and
provide linkage support for a community. - Indicate local tax and levy ameliorations: provide relief, sites and services
assistance, and funding promotions. - Vertically integrate the strategic policy programmes of constituent local
agencies.
Although largely promotional, these styles of agency reinforcement are able, even
in the absence of ‘powers of general competence’, in other terms with subsidiar-
ity powers, to graft and move for sustainable conservation withdevelopment. The
question asked of central governments is, can they accept the premiss that their
contribution is indeed about ‘central’ policy and assistance, andthat it is their func-
tion to pass policy down to lower levels of regional and local government where
the power gets ultimately delivered as action, and the responsibility stops? Only
in those instances where central government accepts a subsidiarity positioning for
local government can the empowerment of development planning and conser-
vancy practice flourish.
One aim is to strengthen the output of central government guidelines and bul-
letins. Powerful metropolitan agencies can work these out for themselves, and
address and fund their particular needs and circumstances. For smaller ‘regional’
agencies the objectivity and support of central government needs to be harnessed
to the quest for guidance on growth patterning policies and practices. As exam-
ples, there can be useful practice notes for urban fringe growth management, for
the management of tourism, conservation best practice, waste management, and186 Practice