The Marsden Jacob Unit Trust

Marsden Jacob Associates is Australia’s leading specialist natural resource economics and policy consultancy. Sustainable water management is at the core of our business. Over the past two decades many of our staff have made significant contributions to the evaluation, design and implementation of national and state level water reforms, policies and initiatives in Australia. Much of our work has centered on crafting solutions to the issues underpinning AWP vision – how to manage water resources effectively and equitably to support sustainable economic development, improve water security for all, and reduce environmental and social impacts and regional tensions caused by water resource governance, allocation and use. We deliver work that combines intellectual discipline, technical rigor, creative thinking, real world experience and common sense. Our advice is pragmatic, workable, and communicated in plain English. We are a highly collegiate consulting practice, operating based on the merit of ideas, arguments, and evidence, not rank. Our business is built around open, regular and constructive communication and knowledge sharing between our team members, and with our clients and partner firms.

Organisational Capability

  • Our analysis and advice provides information that allows our clients to make better decisions. We assist clients to understand the social and economic implications of water sector investments and the value of water resources. We also improve whole-of-community outcomes by advising on regulation, water markets and industry structure. We also help water service providers to understand the relative productivity and long run financial viability of their business. Our capabilities listed below have been developed across all four of the AWP water use domains: watersensitive cities, modern irrigation schemes, environmental water, and catchments and river basins.

    They include:
    - business cases, cost benefit analysis and triple-bottom-line analysis of investments and policies, including financial, economic, and risk, feasibility, financing, incidence impacts
    - water supply strategy development and planning, including demand forecasting and analysis
    - project and program evaluation
    - regulation, competition and pricing
    - water markets, governance and water trading
    - governance and institutional arrangements
    - market-based instruments for managing water quality and flow (auctions, tenders, offsets, in-lieu mechanisms)
    - hydro-economic modelling
    - productivity reviews and efficiency assessment
    - socio-economic impact assessments
    - non-market valuations
    - corporate financial modelling.

Projects