In Australia, Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICM) is the policy framework adopted by government to manage the coastal zone. Amongst other principles, ICM contains an explicit mandate to include local communities in the management of the coastal zone. In Australia, the Coastcare program emerged in response to international acceptance of the need to involve local communities in the management of the coastal zone. This dissertation is a critical cultural investigation of the Coastcare program to discover how the program and the coastal zone generally, is understood and negotiated by three volunteer groups in SE Queensland. There is a paucity of data surrounding the actual experiences of Coastcare volunteers. This dissertation begins to fill this gap in our knowledge of local community involvement in coastal management. My dissertation considers the culture of Coastcare and broadly, community participation initiatives. Coastcare participants, government policymakers, environmental scientists, etc bring to their encounter a specific ‘way of seeing’ the coast – a cultural framework – which guides their actions, ideas and priorities for the coastal zone. These cultural frameworks are established and maintained in the context of unequal relations of power and knowledge. The discourses of environmental science and economics – as evidenced in the chief ICM policy objective, Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) – are powerful knowledges in the realm of community participation policy. This arrangement has serious consequences for what governments and experts can expect to achieve via community participation programs. In short, the quest for ‘power-sharing’ with communities and ‘meaningful participation’ is impeded by dominant scientific and economic cultures which act to marginalise and discredit the cultures of communities (and volunteers). Ironically enough, the lack of consideration of these deeper relations of power and knowledge means that the very groups (such as policymakers, environmental scientists, etc) who actively seek the participation of local communities, contribute disproportionately to the relative failure of community participation programs. At the very least, as those in a position of power, policymakers and associated experts do little to enhance communication with local communities. To this situation add confusion wrought by changes in the delivery of the Coastcare program and a lack of human and financial resources. From this perspective, the warm and fuzzy sentiment of Coastcare can be understood as the ‘Coastcare of neglect’. However, the emergence of community participation as ‘legitimate’ in environmental policymaking indicates a fissure in the traditional power relations between communities and experts. Indeed the entry of ‘community participation policy’ is relatively new territory for the environmental sciences. It is this fissure which I seek to explore and encourage via the application of a cultural studies framework which offers another ‘way of seeing’ community participation in coastal and marine management and thereby, offers avenues to improve relations between communities and experts. My fieldwork reveals a fundamental mismatch between the cultural frameworks which communities bring to the coast and those frameworks embodied and implemented by the Coastcare program. Upon closer examination, it is apparent that the Coastcare program (and community participation programs generally) are designed to introduce local ‘lay’ communities to environmental science knowledge. Local coastal cultures are relegated to the personal and private realm. An excellent example of this is the scientifically oriented ‘eligible areas for funding’ of the Coastcare program. The volunteers consulted for this project emphasized their motivation in terms of ‘maintaining the natural beauty of the coast’ and ‘protecting a little bit of coast from the rampant development of the coastal zone’. Their motivations were largely the antithesis of ESD. They understood their actions as thwarting the negative impacts of coastal development – this occurred within a policy framework which accepted development as fait d’accompli. Australia’s nation of coastal dwellers may not know a lot about ‘coastal ecologies’ but they do know the coast in other ways. Community knowledge of the coast can be largely accounted for in the phrase, ‘Australian beach culture’. Serious consideration of Australian beach culture in environmental policy is absent. The lack of attention to this central tenet of the Australian way of life is because, as a concept and in practice, beach culture lacks the ‘seriousness’ and objectivity of environmental science knowledge – it is about play, hedonism, holidays, spirituality, emotion and fun. The stories (including Indigenous cultural heritage) which emerge when Australians are asked about their ‘beach cultural knowledge’ – historical and contemporary experiences of the Australian coast – await meaningful consideration by those interested in communicating with Australian communities living on the coast. This ‘cultural geography’ is an avenue for policymakers to better communicate and engage with Australian communities in their quest to increase participation in, or motivate interest in community coastal management programs.

Thesis (M. Geomatics Sc.) -- Dept. Geomatics, Univ. of Melb.

The thesis seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the dynamics of interaction between the environmental and labour movements, and the conditions under which they can cooperate and form alliances in pursuit of a sustainable development agenda which simultaneously promotes ecological and social justice goals. After developing an explanatory model of the labour-environmentalist relationship (LER) on the basis of a survey of theoretical and case-study literature, the thesis applies this model to three significant cases of labour-environmental interaction in Australia, each representing a different point on the spectrum from LER conflict to LER cooperation, during the period from 1983 to 1996. Commonly held views that there are inevitable tendencies to LER conflict, whether due to an irreconcilable "jobs versus environment" contradiction or due to the different class bases of the respective movements, are analysed and rejected. A model of the LER implicit in Siegmann (1985) is interrogated against more recent LER studies from six countries, and reworked into a new model (the Siegmann-Norton model) which explains tendencies to conflict and cooperation in the LER in terms of the respective ideologies of labour and environmentalism, their organisational forms and cultures, the national political-institutional framework and the respective places of labour and environmentalism therein, the political economy of specific sectors and regions in which LER interaction occurs, and sui generis sociological and demographic characteristics of labour and environmental actors. The thesis then discusses the major changes in the ideologies, organisational forms and political-institutional roles of the Australian labour movement which occurred during the period of the study, and their likely influence on the LER. The two processes of most importance in driving such changes were the corporatist Accord relationship between the trade union movement and Labor Party government from 1983 to 1996, and the strategic reorganisation of the trade union movement between 1988 and 1996 in response to challenges and opportunities in the wider political-economic environment. The research hypothesis is that the net effect of these changes would have been to foster tendencies towards LER conflict. The hypothesis is tested in three significant case studies, namely: (a) the interaction, often conflictual, between the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the environmental movement in debates around macroeconomic policy, economic restructuring and sustainable development from the mid-1980s onwards; (b) the complex interaction, involving elements of cooperation, disagreement and dialogue, between the environmental movement and the unions representing coal mining and energy workers in the formulation of Australia's climate change policies; and (c) the environmental policy and campaign initiatives of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union to improve workplace environmental performance and promote worker environmental education. The case studies confirmed the research hypothesis in the sense that, whilst the LER tended overall towards greater cooperation in the period of the study, the Accord relationship and union restructuring process worked to slow the growth of cooperative tendencies and sustain conflict over particular issues beyond what might otherwise have been the case. The Accord relationship served to maintain conflict tendencies due to the dominance of productivist ideologies within the ACTU, and the union movement's perseverance with this relationship after the vitiation of its progressive potential by neo-liberal trends in public policy. The tripartite Accord processes institutionalised a "growth coalition" of labour, business and the state in opposition to excluded constituencies such as the environmental movement. This was partially overcome during the period of the Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) process, which temporarily included the environmental movement as an insider in the political-institutional framework. The long-run effects of union reorganisation on the LER are difficult to determine as the new organisational forms of unions were not in place until almost the end of the period of the study. However, in the short term the disruptive effects of the amalgamations process restricted unions' capacity to engage with environmental issues. Pro-environment initiatives by the AMWU, and cooperative aspects of the coal industry unions' relationship with environmentalists, reflected the social unionist ideology and internal democratic practices of those unions, and the influence of the ESD Working Group process, whilst LER conflict over greenhouse reflected the adverse political economy of the coal industry, but also the relevant unions' less developed capacity for independent research and membership education compared to the AMWU. The LER in all three cases can be satisfactorily explained, and important insights derived, through application of the Siegmann-Norton model. Conclusions drawn include suggestions for further research and proposals for steps to be taken by labour and environmental actors to improve cooperation.

The theme of this thesis is that ecologically sustainable coastal management (ESCM) is achievable through the application of law. Once the legal principles and the administrative structures that that law supports have been put into place a framework is created within which the goal of ecologically sustainable development - 'Development that improves the total quality of life, both now and in the future, in a way that maintains the ecological processes on which life depends' can be realised. This thesis approaches the task by analysing the components of ecologically sustainable development (ESD), synthesising them into a set of principles for achieving ESCM and then, by using a comparative approach, devising a number of recommendations, which, if followed, will enable ESCM to be achieved. While the focus is on ESCM, the recommendations could be applied with minimal adaptation, to most, if not all, natural resource management. The thesis is divided into five Parts. Part A looks at the function of law in ESCM and proposes a theoretical model for a legal and administrative regime to be tested in the remaining Parts. Part B considers the context for ESCM and the policies and approaches followed by the different jurisdictions compared throughout this thesis, in addressing sustainable development, with emphasis in chapter four on devising the principles for ESCM. These principles are then developed and analysed in the remaining Parts of the thesis. Part C looks at the current constitutional legal regime for the coastal zone in each jurisdiction and then moves on to consider the first two of the principles for ESCM, international responsibilities and integrated coastal zone management, linked together in this part by the direct dependence on law as the agent for management Part D is about the four remaining principles of ESCM - the practical instruments for achieving ESCM. These are environmental impact assessment, public participation, coastal planning and economic instruments. In the last Part, Part E, the suggested principles for ESCM are brought together and, by a comparison of the various legal and administrative mechanisms used in the jurisdictions reviewed in this thesis, recommendations for achieving ESCM are drawn up. It is suggested that implementation of these recommendations will achieve ecologically sustainable coastal management.

The principal research question addressed in this thesis is how the effectiveness of an environmental legal system can best be evaluated. A legal system is effective if it is achieving or likely to achieve its objectives. For an environmental legal system this means achieving sustainable development. The hypothesis tested in relation to this research question is that the pressure-state-response ("PSR") method of State of the Environment ("SoE") Reporting provides the best available framework for evaluating the effectiveness of an environmental legal system. A subsidiary research question addressed in this thesis is whether the environmental legal system protecting the Great Barrier Reef ("GBR") in north-eastern Australia is likely to achieve sustainable development of it. The hypothesis tested in relation to this research question is that the environmental legal system protecting the GBR is likely to achieve sustainable development of the GBR. The principal method used to address these research questions and test the hypotheses is a case study of the effectiveness of the laws protecting the GBR. Particular emphasis is given in the case study to climate change both because it is now recognised as the major threat to the GBR and is a topic of significant international and national interest. This thesis is intended to contribute, in particular, to the current public and policy debate on responding effectively to climate change by using the GBR as a yardstick against which to measure "dangerous climate change" and, conversely, acceptable climate change. There are five major findings of the research. First, most of the legal writing regarding environmental legal systems is descriptive, explanatory and interpretative rather than evaluative. Second, most legal writers who attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of part or the whole of an environmental legal system implicitly use the PSR method and refer to pressures, conditions, and responses but do not acknowledge this conceptual framework. Third, the best available conceptual and analytical framework for evaluating the effectiveness of an environmental legal system is the PSR method. It is the simplest, most systematic, comprehensive and meaningful framework with the greatest predictive power for evaluating the effectiveness of the total social and legal response to human-induced environmental degradation currently available. Fourth, current practice in SoE reporting, at least in relation to the GBR, is largely descriptive and rarely evaluates the effectiveness of the response. The fifth major finding of this research is that, while there are many effective parts of the response to pressures on the GBR, the current environmental legal system is not likely to be effective in preventing climate change from causing very serious damage to the GBR. Based on what we know at this point in time, particularly the technology that is currently available and current greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts of climate change appear likely to swamp the many good aspects of the legal system protecting the GBR. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in 2005 were approximately 379 parts per million ("ppm") and rising by 2 ppm per year. Including the effect of other greenhouse gases such as methane, the total concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases was around 455 ppm carbon dioxide equivalents ("CO2-eq") in 2005, although the cooling effect of aerosols and landuse changes reduced the net effect to around 375 ppm CO2-eq. Limiting the total increase in mean global temperature to approximately 1°C requires stabilization of atmospheric greenhouse gases and aerosols around 350 ppm CO2-eq. Increasing the net effect of greenhouse gases and aerosols to 450-550 ppm CO2-eq is expected to result in a 2-3°C rise in mean surface temperatures. There are currently no international or national legal constraints to hold greenhouse gas concentrations beneath these levels and they appear likely to be exceeded. These increases in mean global temperatures are expected to severely degrade the GBR by 2030-2040. Even the targets being set by the new Australian Government of reducing Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2050 appear insufficient to protect the GBR. If a 60% reduction in emissions can be achieved globally by 2050 a rise in mean global temperature of around 2.4°C is expected. This indicates the environmental legal system protecting the GBR is not likely to be effective in relation to climate change and, therefore, is failing to reach its objective of sustainable development. Three major recommendations arise from the research. First, legal writers attempting to evaluate the effectiveness of the whole or part of an environmental legal system should use and acknowledge the PSR method. Second, SoE reports should include a stand-alone chapter evaluating the effectiveness of the response. Third, the environmental legal system protecting the GBR should take strong and comprehensive measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if the objective of sustainable development is to be achieved. Such measures should include setting policy targets for stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gas and aerosol concentrations around 350 ppm CO2-eq to limit increases in mean global temperature to 1°C. Policy targets of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases and aerosols at 450-550 ppm CO2-eq to limit increases in mean global temperatures to 2-3°C are likely to be too high to avoid severe impacts of coral bleaching to the GBR.

The thesis is about environmental values that we encounter in our everyday life. The thesis also talks about environmental justice dialogues and tensions that play in Bangladesh. The thesis, in the first place, explores how an environmental planning and resource management approach causes a particular type of environmental injustice; i.e., non-recognition of access to the decision making process of local ethnic communities, which identifies them as adivasi meaning indigenous, poses a threat to their livelihood and culture, and obstructs the process of environmental protection in Bangladesh. / The existing theories of environmental justice and four case studies conducted in Bangladesh have been used to interrogate the research findings. I argue, along with Low and Gleeson (1998) that for environmental justice, recognition of environmental needs for every entity as an ingredient of human dignity should be basis of the planning process. The research findings also suggest that , at all levels of decisions, fair access to decision, information and justice for all entities should be an integral part of environmental planning and resource management. / The thesis explores avenues for fair access to justice, meaning redress and remedy of environmental injustice, in the context of Bangladesh. I argue that capillaries of justice such as Salish, a process and institution for public interest negotiation (PIN) embedded in Bangladesh culture, can be reinvented. In addition, access to information should be a prerequisite for meaningful deliberation at all levels of decision making and dispute resolving processes.