Local government agency and advocacy on major projects in Australia: facilitating active citizenship for environmental politics

Abstract

Local governments are uniquely placed to contribute to democratic engagement both in Australia and in other countries around the world. Also known as municipal governments or local councils, this level of government closest to the community has particular advantages in contributing to community engagement by virtue of their being both a part of their communities and a level of government. In an age where media sound bites and populism threaten the quality of the public’s understanding of policy issues and where environmental crises loom large, the need for deeper public engagement in government decision-making is more urgent than ever. Unlike any other tool of government public engagement has the potential to contribute to normative change and to support policy communities in defence of the public interest. Good governance principles continue to evolve throughout the literature but always include the need for participation. The wealth of literature relating to, for example, deliberative democracy builds on this premise – that greater public engagement based on rational discussion and reflection should be an objective of, and foundational to, the democratic improvement project.These themes have strong links to the environment movement. There is increasing consensus that a fundamental transformation of human systems is required to ensure sustainable human futures. Public engagement is an essential part of this transformation. Where normative change is needed to generate public support of sustainability policies, public engagement is the solution. Alternatively, where the public is in support of environmentally sustainable policies, their participation in decision-making is required to keep governments accountable to the public interest. This thesis explores examples of the latter using two major projects where the public and local governments generated grass-roots discourses about the merits of major projects and advocated against them. The overarching aims of the study was to investigate how and under what circumstances local governments enhance participation in and deliberation about major projects in Australia.The presentation of the findings begins in Chapter 2 by charting the history of the communities and local governments that were the subject of the case studies and analysing how their identity and values contributed to local governments’ willingness to engage with these projects. The literature on citizen engagement often refers to the importance of context for determining the success of public engagement. This thesis chose not to leave these important considerations as ‘context’ but rather to delve into what factors contribute to active local governments and communities. In Chapter 3, the thesis uses the analytical lens of policy tools to undertake an empirical analysis of how local governments contributed to decision-making for these projects. It finds that they used procedural policy tools to influence policy change, including by providing information, resources and coordination. This study identifies the policy tools that local governments used that were particularly effective in drawing into question the state governments’ position in support of these projects. These were actions that reached beyond the bureaucracy and highlighted the political marginality of the issues. Chapters 4 and 5 of the thesis analyse the value of the local governments’ contributions. Chapter 4 demonstrates how these actions taken by local governments can contribute to good governance for decision-making for major projects, even though they experience a range of disincentives to advocate. It finds local governments are uniquely placed to make a valuable contribution to the diversity and availability of information about projects, and to increasing participation in, and deliberation about them. In Chapter 5, the thesis engages with the question of how these actions helped to create opportunities for environmentally sustainable public policy decisions. It introduces a number of mini case studies to enhance discussion about the frequency of local government activities observed in the two primary case studies. This chapter again finds a number of barriers: state governments failed to engage genuinely prior to decision-making and when they did engage, they failed to respond to the wishes of the majority of local citizens and their stakeholders. Despite this, local governments contributed to broad, grass roots campaigns that generated alternative sources of political power to seek alignment between the wishes of the majority of local citizens and their local governments and the policy outcome. The discussion chapter highlights the significance of the findings in the thesis with a discussion about the macro and micro considerations of local governments’ contributions. Overall, the findings from this research demonstrate the valuable contributions local governments make to democratic engagement, good governance and environmental public policy directions, and provides new insights on how local governments might be enabled to do so more often in the future.