What Are We Really Trying to Achieve? Australian Environmental Meta-Policy Objectives since 1970

This paper examines the narrative of the highest level of Australian environmental policy (meta-policy) in the period from 1970. It argues that the narrative pivots around the adoption of Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) as the goal of national environmental policy in the early 1990s. Before that time, the meta-policy narrative concerns the protection of special places and the development of an overarching policy goal. Once such a goal was adopted in the form of ESD, the narrative concerns the efforts of governments, not only to interpret ESD but also to avoid it, by adopting a number of pseudo sustainability formulations. This was to avoid the difficult trade-offs arising from the ecological constraints inherent in applying ESD