Cross pollination or cross-contamination?: Directions for informing the management of invasives with market-economy concepts

Abstract

At the 15th Weeds Conference (Preston et al. 2006), my audience and I came up with some interesting potential innovations to tackle weed invasion, without reliance on government funds. That discussion serves as the seed for this keynote. In this paper I want explore radical possibilities, in the hope that they might blossom into exotic, but hopefully beneficial maturity. Our understanding of plants, epidemiology and natural systems is expanding quite fast. Our understanding of how to adjust behaviour to advance sustainability is doing so more slowly. Many experiments are occurring in the weeds arena that could inform behavioural strategy, if only we had a paradigm to work within. The paper presents some aspects of that possible paradigm, which includes: 1. A coupled systems concept of behaviour and behavioural strategy; 2. Adopting a multi-attribute, multi-instrument approach to the design of interventions; 3. Using transaction costs as a policy lens; and 4. The adoption of disciplined, continuous learning approaches to the quality of our intervention strategies.