Global Regimes and Nation-States: Environmental Issues in Australian Politics

237 Pages·1991·14.788 MB·English

by  Robert Boardman

GIOIMREGIMES
mUHMES
ENVINNMElîlllISSUIS
IN H All All POLITICS
This page intentionally left blank
emu Minis
mi
MUM SUKS
[NVII!»Tm ISSUES
m ADAH H POUÏICS
Robert Boardman
Carleton University Press
Ottawa, Canada
1990
© Carleton University Press Inc. 1990
ISBN 0-88629-109-7 paperback
0-88629-119-4 casebound
Printed and bound in Canada
Carleton Public Policy Series #4
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Boardman, Robert
Global regimes and nation-states: environmental
issues in Australian politics
(Carleton public policy series #4)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-88629-119-4 (bound). —
ISBN 0-88629-109-7 (pbk.)
1. Environmental protection — Government policy —
Australia. I. Title. II. Series.
HC610.E5B63 1990 363.7'056'0994 C90-090142-X
Distributed by: Oxford University Press Canada
70 Wynford Drive
Don Mills, Ontario
Canada. M3C 1J9
[phone]
Cover design: Aerographics Ottawa
Acknowledgement
Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its
publishing programme by the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science
Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
For Matthew
This page intentionally left blank
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Acronyms xii
1. Introduction: Global Arrangements and the Australian Polity 1
Australia in the international system 3
The natural environment as a policy arena 8
I. Australia and International Environmental Order
2. International Institutions: The Environment and Foreign Policy 19
Australian diplomacy in the United Nations system 19
The OECD and environmental policy 28
Non-governmental conservation networks 31
Environmental institutions in Australian foreign policy 34
3. The Politics of Conservation: Wildlife, Ecosystems and Heritage 39
The international politics of the wildlife trade 40
Migratory species and habitats conservation 48
World heritage sites and the Tasmanian dam 51
Australia and international conservation policy 55
4. The International Regulation of Pollution 61
Australia and the UNCLOS HI negotiations 61
International marine pollution conventions 67
The western industrialized nations and toxic chemicals 71
Pollution as an international issue 73
5. Australia, Antarctica and the Southern Ocean 77
Sovereignty and policy in Antarctica 77
Environmental protection under the Antarctica Treaty 81
The conservation of marine living resources 84
Antarctic ecosystems and Australian policy 90
II. Charting the Policy Process
6. Institution-building and Cooperative Federalism 97
The Australian states as environmental actors 97
Policy process at the Commonwealth level 99
The politics and mechanics of federal-state collaboration 107
Cooperative federalism and the environment Ill
vn
7. Federal-state Diplomacy and International Institutions 117
The states, the Commonwealth and international institutions 117
The political economy of chemicals regulation 121
Towards a National Conservation Strategy 124
Institution-building at the international level 128
8. The Management of International Conventions 133
The negotiation and impact of international agreements 133
Jurisdiction in the marine environment 145
Antarctica and the Australian policy process 149
The politics of international conventions 151
9. Domestic Contexts: Environmental Constituencies
in Australian Politics 157
The evolution and character of the environmental movement 158
Environmental groups and Australian public opinion 162
Influence strategies and environmental issues 166
The role of the scientific community 175
Domestic politics and the global environment 179
III. The Politics of Regimes
10. Australia and the Global Environment, 1965-1985 187
The making of Australia's international environment policy — 187
Impact of the external milieu 192
Australia in comparative perspective 195
Theory and practice in regime construction 202
Bibliography 207
Index 213
Vlll
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
nternational arrangements of one kind or another, on the determination of
almost anything from airline routes to permitted amounts of food additives,
have grown more numerous and pervasive in recent decades. What difference
do they make? How do governments formulate policies to deal with the institutions
and agreements that direct these activities? What impact do international ar-
rangements have on government programmes and organization, and on the
workings of domestic politics? More specifically, to turn to the subject of the
present study, how effective are international arrangements for encouraging
cooperation between states in the field of environmental policy?
Australia provides a sturdy vehicle for exploring these more general questions.
Like Canada, it has a federal system in which responsibility for many of the
domestic policy areas currently impinged on by international arrangements lies
primarily, or to a significant degree, at the state or provincial level. In both Australia
and Canada, environmental policy issues with important international dimensions
— acid rain, protection of coastlines and offshore areas from oil pollution, living
resource conservation and development, to name just a few — have climbed
high on national political agendas. The politics of the preservation of the South
Moresby area of British Columbia in the mid-1980s had some intriguing points
in parallel with the more turbulent conflict over wilderness conservation in south-
west Tasmania a few years earlier. The subject of this study is the interplay
between international and domestic factors in Australian environmental policy
and politics from 1965 to 1985. These two decades, from the beginnings of a
national debate on environmental issues in the mid-1960s to the shifting priorities
evident in the approaches of the first and second Hawke administrations in the
mid-1980s, encompassed far-reaching changes in policies, programmes and
government organization. The emergence of distinctively national policies, under
a succession of Commonwealth governments of the 1970s, was closely tied,
moreover, to the ways in which Australia began during this period to define itself
as a player on the larger stage of international environmental politics.
The main body of the study is divided into two sets of chapters. In Part I,
Australia is treated as an actor in the state system. The focus is on the policies
and strategies adopted towards the main institutions and conventions in the
environmental area. Australian policies within various international organizations
are examined in Chapter 2. These centre around the organs and agencies of the
United Nations system, and extend also to the environmental work of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and, at the
non-governmental level, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and
Natural Resources (IUCN). A group of international conventions dealing with
conservation questions is discussed next (Chapter 3), including those related to
the politics of the wildlife trade, questions of migratory species and their habitats,
and the protection of heritage sites. Chapter 4 turns to pollution issues, with an
IX