The Hidden Successes Of Three Sustainability Policies

By Kuntal Goswami and Rolf Gerritsen

This book provides a practical demonstration of policymaking and policy life-cycle analysis.

We all hear about a government policy or scheme when it is formally announced in the newspaper, or on television but we do not know where the initial idea comes from, nor how and why the idea is transformed into a formal political agenda. T

• Language: English
• Publisher: ACSDRI Knowledge Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645255010

Book preview

Preface

This book provides a practical demonstration of policymaking and policy life-cycle analysis. In order to accomplish these objectives, we have used three Australian state-level policies, Tasmania Together, South Australia’s Strategic Plan and the Western Australian State Sustainability Strategy, as case studies.

We all hear about a government policy or scheme when it is formally announced in the newspaper, or on television but we do not know where the initial idea comes from, nor how and why the idea is transformed into a formal political agenda. These are some of the important questions we need to understand in the field of policymaking. Equally important is to explore how and why a policy loses its relevance.

This book answers these behind-the-scenes questions. It provides a framework to investigate the life cycle of a public policy and a multi-disciplinary approach to understand the level of commitment towards holistic sustainability (environment, economic, and social). This makes the book unique and unconventional and therefore, it can be used as a practical guide for research students, academics, and public policy practitioners.

The book investigates every stage of these three selected case studies to understand the steps involved in policymaking and the reasons for policy redundancy. All discourses are substantiated using a wide range of sources, including interviews with relevant stakeholders. A public policy is like a product, and it has a shelf life. However, the success of a policy lies in its commitment and legacy. The book also outlines a process to analyse public agencies’ internal commitment to the sustainability agenda.

In addition to providing practical illustrations of policy analysis, this book also presents an overview of how the sustainable development agenda is disseminated and incorporated into the public policy domain. Each of the selected policies had a role in advancing the sustainable development agenda in the political domain.

Overall, the book is bold and informative, addresses both the national and international contexts, and uses parliamentary discussions, budget, public agency’s annual reports, stakeholders’ comments, and other statistical data to seek answers to the question of impact. It also provides clarity and precision through the use of relevant diagrams and tables that summarise the text.

This empirical research also demonstrates that the very idea of sustainability can, if only gradually, have a positive impact on the decision-making culture of an organisation if sufficient support from policy champions is given. We reaffirmed this point in our postscript chapter.

Finally, the book reveals that institutional factors may facilitate the diffusion of a sustainable development value-based policy model, but the actual implementation of the policy framework depends on fortuitous political-economic factors. Hence, the book highlights the relevance of understanding and analysing the political dimension of sustainable development (O’Connor 2006).

1.1 Context

Public policy is the political offspring of certain political processes, movements, values or ideologies. Every policy is drafted with an agenda to bring about change. However, every policy has a political shelf-life, no matter how great its objectives. Generally, a policy’s shelf-life is linked to the political fortunes of its champion or of the political entity that drafted it. At the same time, the success of a policy can be judged by its commitment and policy legacy. Furthermore, public policy is not ‘born out of the blue’. Instead, it is born out of a political, economic, social, environmental context that leads to the drafting of the policy. A policy also goes through different phases of relevance in its life cycle before it loses its shelf-life.

Hence, this book provides an analytical perspective of policymaking through systematic investigation of three Australian state-level public policies of the early 2000s. In Australia, between 1998 and the first half of the 2000s, all Labor Party-governed states adopted holistic-sustainability (environmental, economic, and social) value-based strategic plans or strategies. Through this new policy value, the Labor Party attempted to overcome the shortcomings of the New Public Management policy model. In this book three such over-arching state-level policies are selected to represent this trend. The three policies are: Tasmania Together (TT), South Australia’s Strategic Plan (SASP) and Western Australia’s State Sustainability Strategy (WA’s SSS).

The key question is whether the Labor Party’s adoption of these policies was driven by a set of noble values as a kind of political-enlightenment, or if there were any deep-seated political motivation. In addition, we also looked at the political-economic context and the circumstances that led to the adoption of an holistic-sustainability value-based strategic plan or strategy. What led to what? What sort of policy-lifecycle pattern did these policies follow? Was there any policy legacy and impact? All these policy analysis perspectives have been addressed in this book.

1.2 Brief overview of the research

In this book both macro and micro factors have been examined, in addition to the governments’ internal and external commitment to sustainable development. Keeping in mind these broad objectives, a wide range of data have been corroborated. We adopted an interpretive case study method (Baxter & Jack, 2008; Vennesson, 2008; Yin, 2009). We applied the process-tracing method to understand the policy life-cycle process. This method facilitated the identification of links between possible causes and outcomes of policy making, and the investigation of the preceding events or motivations that led to the formulation of these selected public policies. Thus, the process-tracing technique enabled us to map sequential events through the systematic study of historical and archival documents and transcripts of interviews with stakeholders (Bennett & Checkel, 2015).

Hence, in order to understand the context within which the policies were developed, the factors that changed the course of these policies, and to reveal the level of commitment towards sustainable development, the following data have been used in this study:

•the academic literature, public policy documents, government media releases, and the transcripts of parliamentary proceedings from Hansard (an archive of parliamentary debates) on Tasmania Together, South Australia’s Strategic Plan, and the State Sustainability Strategy of Western Australia; and

•state government budget reports, annual reports of key public agencies, and transcripts from multi-stakeholder interviews have been used to achieve the research objectives.

The previous literature on a topic can be a rich source of data to understand contextual issues, whereas parliamentary debates on a policy can provide insight into the formal stated position of all the political players associated with the policy. Governments formulate policies for various political reasons: however, real commitment to a policy can only be understood by analysing how much funding is allocated in the budget towards the policy, or by examining the responsible public agency’s commitment to implement the policy.

Stakeholders can be an insightful source of information for understanding the dynamics of policymaking and can also provide information that is not stated in the formal literature. Hence, during the research a wide range of stakeholders were interviewed from all three jurisdictions, including:

•senior ministerial staff and senior policy advisors of the relevant ministerial portfolios; related shadow cabinet ministers or their senior policy advisors;

•relevant senior executives at directorial or managerial levels from key public agencies;

•apex pressure groups from industry, and social and environmental organisations;

•each state’s respective local government association; and,

•relevant academics (from a range of disciplines including politics and public policy, economics, and social, environmental, and urban planning).

These groups of stakeholders were integrally involved with these policies in their respective states. The stakeholders were involved either at the policy formulation stage, or associated with the government as advisors, implemented the policies, or closely monitored the policies, and/or extensively wrote about the policies. Through this exclusive data, the book provides a new perspective on the three policies and contributes to the process of policy lifecycle analysis in general.

1.2.1 Application of the GRI’s SSPA framework

Sustainable development is a multi-disciplinary concept. A policy based on the concept also requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Accounting is a subject of measurement. To understand the extent to which holistic sustainability values are practiced at the micro-level, the study has applied the sustainability reporting framework as an analytical tool. Sustainability reporting is a new branch of accounting that stands in contrast with traditional financial accounting.

The idea of environmental reporting gained strong support at the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (Department of Environment and Heritage, 2003). Following recommendations in the Agenda 21 action plan report of the Earth Summit conference, the UN statistical unit published a Handbook of National Accounting entitled Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (UN, 2000; UN, 2014; Vardon et al., 2016). With the coining of the term ‘triple bottom line’ by John Elkington in 1998, environmental reporting transformed into a more holistic reporting structure known as sustainability reporting, which encompasses environmental, economic, and social performance reporting. Sustainability reporting or triple bottom line reporting is defined as:

…a vehicle to assess the economic, environmental, and social impacts of the organisation’s operations, products, and services, and its overall contribution to sustainable development…(Kubo 2004, p.20)

Hence, it is a way to measure, disclose, and demonstrate an organisation’s internal accountability to both internal and external stakeholders. In addition, it is a communicative tool for an organisation to make transparent disclosures about its commitment to sustainable development objectives (GRI, 2011; Soderstrom, 2013).

To investigate the extent of sustainability disclosure in annual reports the study has applied the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) Sector Supplementary for Public Agencies (SSPA) – a public sector reporting framework. The GRI is the most comprehensive and widely used set of multi-stakeholder focused international guidelines for sustainability reporting (Hawke, 2004; Lozano and Huisingh, 2011; Marimon et al., 2012; Del Mar Alonso-Almeida et al., 2014). The GRI is a non-profit organisation that has developed and advocated for sustainability reporting frameworks to guide organisations, both public sector and private sector, to contribute towards the global sustainable development agenda. The organisation provides a communication framework to address the information expectations of multi-stakeholders. In this regard, the GRI (2016a) (p.5) has stated that:

GRI Standards provide a global understanding and knowledge base on sustainable development…Sustainability reporting…builds an enabling environment for sustainable development to occur…Sustainability reports empower stakeholders by providing access to important information…

In 1997, the GRI was set up in Boston as a project department of the US non-profit organisation, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES), in association with the Tellus Institute and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (GRI, 2016b). The GRI launched its first version of the sustainability reporting framework in 2000 and an updated version at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 (Department of Environment and Heritage, 2003). In 2002, the GRI moved to Amsterdam, and re-established itself as a formal UNEP collaborating organisation (GRI, 2016b). The GRI had previously published sustainability disclosure guidelines for various sectors including aviation, mining, oil and gas, and food processing. In 2005, the organisation published the Sector Supplement for Public Agencies with the support of the Directorate-General for Employment and Social Affairs, from the European Commission; the City of Melbourne, Australia; and the Australian Government’s Department of Family and Community Services (GRI, 2005).

The application of the GRI’s SSPA framework revealed the type of policies, programs and practices adopted at the micro- level (at the agency level) during the policy time frame of the three selected strategic plans or strategies in each jurisdiction. In the GRI’s SSPA, the key disclosure expectations are to establish whether a public organisation has a sustainable development-based public policy, its policy implementation measures, and its overall holistic performance and disclosures in relation to its environmental, economic, and social obligations, as shown in Table 1.1. A disclosure in the context of this research is a text or phrase and discourse that relates, manifests, represents, or describes environmental, economic, and social sustainability.

Hence, to investigate holistic accountability towards sustainability, the respective public agency’s annual report disclosure was analysed against the GRI’s SSPA governance, environmental, economic and social sustainability criteria. In the process the following words were also searched for in the annual reports: sustainable development, sustainable procurement, water, or paper (consumed as a physical quantity), emissions, greenhouse gases, climate change, waste, recycling, biodiversity, social inclusion, employee breakdown, privacy, equal opportunity, Indigenous or Aboriginal, LGBT, disability, and efficiency. The study examined in what context these words were used or discussed in annual reports. In addition, we looked at why and what factors influenced the use of these words, for instance: was it because of a law or policy? Were the program or these words used across the board in annual reports of all observed departments? Were the words found in only one department’s annual report or in one particular year or over the subsequent years? Are there any substantial trends or changes? Is the action material in nature?

Table 1.1 Components of the GRI’s Sector Supplement for Public Agencies (SSPA)

Public policies and implementation measures

(strategy to contribute towards sustainable development, public policy priorities in a jurisdiction, sustainable development goals, stakeholder engagement, and implementation measures)

Economic performance indicators

(income breakdown, breakdown of supplies, employee payroll, donations to the community, breakdown of expenditure, procurement policies based on sustainable development principles, economic-environmental-social criteria for expenditure and financial commitments)

Environmental performance indicators

(materials used for operations, direct and indirect energy use, initiatives for