Australia came very close to legislating an emissions trading scheme as part of a climate policy package in 2009. This climate policy was driven by a new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who had made addressing climate change his signature policy commitment both before and after the 2007 election that brought the Australian Labor Party to power. His climate policy was underpinned by two main interrelated narratives: ecological modernisation and climate justice. In this paper I consider the story of the Rudd government's climate policy experience through an ecological modernisation lens. In the end, it was the seeming disjuncture between political rhetoric and policy outcomes that brought the Rudd prime ministership down. The telling of the Rudd climate story through these narratives reveals some of the limitations of (mainstream) ecological modernisation as a major environmental management approach, as well as highlighting the vagaries of political leadership.

This paper explores the contestation dynamics between the unconventional gas mining sector and its challengers through the prism of the social licence to operate. Social licence is a dominant narrative in the mining sector today and as a signifier of the sector's CSR credentials, the term is an influential one. Its capacity to confer project legitimacy, and hence avoid the risks of community opposition, helps explain why most companies seek to gain one. Today both gas proponents and opponents talk the language of social licence: the former to defend their projects, the latter to challenge them. Yet, beyond rhetoric, the precise meaning of social licence remains elusive. This paper uses a case study of community opposition to primarily coal seam gas projects in an eastern Australian region to explore how the absence of a precise meaning for social licence has created a strategic opportunity space for the industry's opponents to invest social licence with a potent democracy frame. This democracy framing has proved particularly effective as a contestation tool and helps explain the outcomes in this case.

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