Elsevier

This paper re-visits the concept of water efficiency applied to Spanish agriculture and assesses how this technical concept is sometimes lost in translation when applied at different spatial scales. The paper traces the historical dominance of irrigated agriculture in Spanish water policy. It analyses the water efficiency concept at the macro level, by evaluating recent national policy initiatives and public investment programmes over the last decade to modernise irrigation, which anticipated large water savings.

Choosing effective policy instruments to achieve conservation goals has many challenges. We explore the challenge of instrument choice in the context of landscape-scale conservation on private land, where the challenge is to select instruments that are able to influence the management practices of large numbers of landholders with diverse values, beliefs and management priorities. We report on a landholder survey and workshop undertaken as part of a study focused on reversing scattered tree decline on private grazing land in Australia.