Changing Policy Mindsets: ESD and NCP Compared

Political modernisation for ecologically sustainable development in Australia

“…Together these requirements help create the more balanced environment-development relationship that SD relies on. Our brief overview of ESD finds that while considerable institutional Australasian Journal of Environmental Management 17 modernisation and policy development has indeed occurred, the rise -and subsequent fall -of key developments often coalesced with the broader political, ideological and electoral ambitions of different governments (see McEachern 1991;Curran & Hollander 2002). While this is to be expected, it highlights the vulnerability and dependence of SD goals on the vagaries of political actors and their specific political agendas, diminishing the capacity of the environment to stand as an independent and bipartisan entity.…”

Australia's Indicator‐Based Sustainability Assessments and Public Policy

“…The difficulty encountered in achieving highly coordinated policy responses does not mean that this infeasible or impractical. Some scholars have compared the limited success of ESD to the National Competition Policy (NCP) as a meta‐policy response driven by a similar federal‐state process (Curran and Hollander 2002). As a reform package, the NCP has fared much better than ESD, especially in terms of matching institutional reform, although the latter arguably had more community support as a policy imperative and more empirical credibility (Dovers and Gullet 1999).…”

“…This applies to other sectoral policy initiatives, such as the Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) process (Mobbs 2003), and represents a lost opportunity to connect and develop experience in ESD implementation across time and sectors. Such fragmentation is predictable, as options to create institutional mechanisms to establish and maintain the broader ESD policy agenda were not pursued by successive Commonwealth governments (Hamilton and Throsby 1998; Curran and Hollander 2002; Dovers 2002). The cross‐sectoral and whole‐of‐government potential of the NSESD dissipated quickly.…”

Towards More Integrated Natural Resource Management in Victoria: Possible Elements of an Integrated State-wide Policy Framework

“…While potentially a major undertaking, such an approach has potential to improve environmental performance. The experience with the National Competition Policy demonstrates that mandated regulatory review processes are possible (Curran and Hollander 2002).…”