Overcoming segregation problematics for environmentally accountable and transformative policy in a changing climate: The case of Australia’s EPBC Act.

The needs for environmental accountabilities and sustainability transformation are growing in Australia due to changing climate and collapsing biodiversity, but building robust environmental accountabilities and enabling sustainability transformation and human, nonhuman and ecological community resilience is proving elusive. This chapter examines Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act)—the Australian Government’s key legislation for protecting environments of national significance—which has recently been reviewed, and found to have achieved few of its stated objectives. This analysis utilises a critical environmental accountability frame to better understand how the legislation’s procedures and norms have translated into ineffective practice. Three longstanding, problematic tendencies of segregation—between (a) human and ecological cultures; (b) science, and policy and practice; and (c) sectoral scopes of policy—are identified to help explain the barriers to and challenges in enabling robust environmental accountability. Examining the EPBC Act and these problematics of segregation, the chapter outlines how relational rather than segregated understandings might build stronger pathways towards the environmental accountability and socio-environmental transformation needed for the challenges of the Anthropocene.