The impact of ESD on Australia's environmental institutions

Ecologically sustainable development (ESD) has been a meta-objective of Australian environmental policy for more than two decades. This article questions the effectiveness of ESD, asking whether it has had a material impact on Australia's environmental institutions. The argument made is that, while ESD has had some success at the margins, its overall impact has been limited. The institutions necessary to ensure policy makers impose and abide by a binding strong sustainability constraint based on the maintenance of natural capital have not been created. There have been advances in environmental protection since the early 1990s but, by and large, these have been a product of the same types of political and contextual factors that drove policy prior to the adoption of ESD. The score may have changed, but the rules have remained the same.