‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

Is there a problem with stimulating behavioural change through incentives?
Market-based and other incentive systems can be very effective in bringing about minor changes at 
the individual level, but major systems change requires 
direct
public involvement. This might entail 
genuine partnering arrangements between government, industry and community in planning, design 
and action – as opposed to award ceremonies and certificates. In some cases, indirect market-based 
incentive systems work to impede change by diverting resources from problem solving and opportunity 
creating to ‘displacement activity’. For example, building rating and assessment approaches are high 
in transaction costs [Chapters 5 and 11]. Thus the reliance on marginal change through incentives, 
again, reflects the view that negative impacts are an inevitable aspect of development. It is believed 
that the environment can at best be ‘cleaned up’, not restored. Hence, this seemingly non-profitable, 
janitorial function has been left to environmental non-government organizations (NGOs). These 
must lobby for funds, or address environmental issues on a volunteer basis, such as rehabilitating 
farmland or planting trees – while land clearing is effectively subsidized elsewhere. At the same time, 
governments have abdicated basic public responsibilities, functions and infrastructure to markets 
through various forms of privatization, outsourcing and downsizing, as documented in Ridgeway’s 
It’s 
All for Sale
.
58
Clearly, then, our environmental management systems and incentives are not addressing 
the fundamental ethical, democratic and ecological issues underlying sustainability [Chapter 12].
Surely environmental management processes do not impede sustainability?
No, but they supplant action. Our environmental management systems do not actually prohibit 
investment in expanding natural capital. Nor do they necessarily prohibit investing creative energy in 
eco-innovation and eco-retrofitting. However, management methods, processes, conventions and tools 
(founded on the belief that negative impacts are inevitable) resonate with inertia, displacement and 
negativity. Thus they make creativity and innovation uptake difficult. Technically and conceptually, 
the alternative – design for eco-services – is comparatively simple. It would be easy to increase the 
conditions for eco-services and biodiversity, and provide positive off-site impacts that add value 
to the ecological base. It would also be more clearly justified, counting the savings we gain from 
replacing resource-intensive systems with natural ones and the costs of inaction in not doing so.
But to enable and implement Positive Development, we also need to re-design both our intellectual 

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21
Design for Eco-services
‘grey matter’ and institutional ‘dark matter’. The first step is to recognize that our environmental 
management frameworks do not support, and often impede, planning, design and management 
for Positive Development. Some of the problems of environmental management are examined in 
following chapters. There are common patterns on all levels. For example:
•
Environmental management and assessment systems are biased toward new resource- 
intensive buildings. They do not count the social and environmental costs already embedded
in existing development, or the costs of demolition. Assessment tools help us see some kinds
of downstream consequences in the environment, but not the broader distributional impacts
of development over time. They do not encourage innovation to address distributional and
equity issues [Chapters 5, 7 and 8].
• 
Public reporting and certification systems, as currently undertaken, involve high transaction 
costs. Governments report trends, not the unsustainable waste, inefficiencies and/or
inequities caused by existing systems of development. If we mapped the costs of inaction,
innovations might begin to address existing system-wide problems [Chapters 9 and 14].
• 
Planning starts from where we are now and thus only puts marginal changes on the balance
sheets of decision-makers. This conceals how far we are from sustainability [Figure 2]. Even
bioregional planning has not developed strategies to implement planning visions in a context
of existing vested interests and established industries, as protected by power relationships,
institutional barriers and hidden subsidies
59
[Chapter 12].
• 
Futures planning tools are not designed for eco-innovation, that is, creating something that is
new and which works to change the social context in positive directions. They purport either
to 
prepare
for future contingencies or to 
chart
a future game plan, rather than redesign the
game itself. They operate from a sectional perspective, rather than in the public interest
[Chapter 10].
• 
Trading schemes have not encouraged innovation to improve existing ecological conditions.
In other words, they generally only mitigate future harm. Moreover, they often represent a de 
facto privatization of the public estate (whether through public or private control) by
exempting basic resource allocation decisions from democratic safeguards [Chapter 11].