Environmental Policy Failure

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"Environmental Policy Failure: The Australian Story" provides Australia's environment is under unprecedented stress, which is now all too real in terms of problems such as rising sea levels, catastrophic bush fires, drought and dying river systems. This book argues that this stress is more than a failure of environmental management, and indeed more even than a failure of political will, although that has been critical. It is a failure of policy on many fronts rooted in the failure of development practices to integrate ecological sensitivities and concerns. What is more, this failure is long standing, and remains steeped in two hundred years of Eurocentric valuing of nature in economic terms rather than as ecological capital. This book reviews some of Australia's most critically challenging environmental issues of our time and assesses the capacity of contemporary policies to solve them. It reveals, case by case, the nature of environmental policy failure, as a characteristic failure for example of both Labor and conservative governments across many generations. It is relatively clear then why Australia's energy emissions have been burgeoning and why there has been no industrial restructuring over the last two decades to reverse this now dire trend.

Chapter 1 - Introduction; Chapter 2 - Constructing environmental policy; Chapter 3 - Climate policy failure; Chapter 4 - Lost energy policies, opportunities and practice; Chapter 5 - Saving the Murray-Darling basin; Chapter 6 - Peri-urban water policy; Chapter 7 - Disintegration or disinterest? Marine and costal policy in Australia; Chapter 8 - Between markets and government: NRM policy in Australia; Chapter 9 - Australian environmental NGOs and government; Chapter 10 - Taking the politics out: Australian forest policy 1900 - 2010; Chapter 11 - Climate change adaptation and government; Chapter 12 - Catastrophic bushfire, politics and the public interest; Chapter 13 - Overpopulating Australia; Chapter 14 - Conclusions.

About the Author

Associate Professor Kate Crowley is Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia, where she lectures in public and environmental policy. Her interests are in: green politics, policy and governance; climate change policy; federalism and environmental policy; sustainability; and policy theory and analysis. She is a past Dean of Graduate Research for the University of Tasmania, an elected member of the University of Tasmania Council, and the Chair of the Premier`s Tasmania Climate Action Council, an independent statutory authority that reports to Climate Change Minister and Tasmanian Greens Leaders Nick McKim-the first Green minister in Australia. Kate has published extensively on environmental governance, green politics and public policy, and is co-editor with KJ Walker of Australian Environmental Policy: Studies in Decline and Devolution.KJ Walker is an independent researcher and, according to one reviewer, he `pioneered the study of environmental politics in Australia'. He has taught at Melbourne, Monash, Flinders, Adelaide, Case Western Reserve, Cleveland State, Griffith, Queensland and Macquarie universities, and, from the mid-1970s, he developed and taught groundbreaking interdisciplinary courses in environmental policy and politics. He writes in the fields of environmental policy and environmental political theory, but has subsidiary interests in technology, technology transfer, and technology history in its social context.

Table of Contents

About the Author