Ecological modernisation, ecologically sustainable development and Australia's national ESD strategy

© 2002 Dr. Peter ChristoffInternationally, over the past two decades, many countries have attempted to use national and sub-national strategies-green plans-to integrate environmental and economic policy making, management and activity. Three such plans have been developed in Australia, two national strategies-the National Conservation Strategy for Australia in 1983, and the National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (NSESD) in 1992-and a sub-national strategy, the Victorian State Conservation Strategy, Protecting the Environment, in 1987. This thesis describes and analyses each strategy, focusing on the development and implementation of the NSESD, the most substantial attempt at green planning in Australia to date. It examines the NSESD in relation to the evolution and adoption in Australia of different discourses of ecological modernisation, and against the requirements for state environmental capacity building necessary to promote ecological sustainability. In relation to the NSESD, this thesis argues that the conjunctural moment-the 'two or three brief shining years' -that stretched from the start of 1989 to the end of 1991 offered a rare opportunity for significant institutional reform in and beyond the domain of Australian environmental politics and policy. That situative context configured a landscape in which new actors, and ideas about ecological modernisation, could flourish. During 1990 and 1991 in particular, it appeared that Australia was undergoing a substantial political, social and economic transformation associated with a range of new initiatives that promised policy stability and, perhaps, ecological sustainability. The most far reaching was the process for developing the NSESD. In 1991, the ESD Working Groups recommended sectoral initiatives that reflected aspects of weak ecological modernisation and capacity building proposals for institutional change reflecting the discourse of strong ecological modernisation. However the context for environmental policy innovation then deteriorated. Economic circumstances again confined opportunities for institutional refonn and, during 1992, institutional inertia overwhelmed the initiatives of the Working Group process. This led to a Strategy that only faintly reflected the innovations of the earlier Working Group phase, lacked strong political or public support, and consequently was implemented only weakly. This outcome was in part conditioned by the legacy of failures associated with the earlier NCSA (failures repeated through the ESD process), in part the result of inadequate policy entrepreneurship and failures of political leadership. Nevertheless, the ESD Working Group process and the NSESD did contribute to and helped consolidate a significant cultural shift towards the now prevalent environmental discourse of weak ecological modernisation