Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Forest policy Australia'

During the past three decades, in Newfoundland, there have been repeated high level recommendations made concerning the formulation of an integrated land-use policy. In particular, the forest sector has expressed the need for such a policy through recommendations made by several Royal Commissions on Forestry, a Federal-Provincial Task Force on Forestry, and through a number of other documents and forums. This research study began as a problem solving mission, i.e., to answer the questions: Why has an integrated forest land-use policy not been formulated? What are the limiting factors constraining the policy formulation process? After a preliminary review of the literature and an initial listing of some possible constraints, it became obvious that the complexity of the policy formulation process all but precluded any neatly bounded solutions. Therefore, the problem solving mission evolved into an exploratory process. Based on some empirical observations, I decided that the higher education system might be one of the weak links in the land-based policy formulation process in Newfoundland. At the same time, the higher education system appeared to hold great promise in finding long-term pervasive solutions to land-use problems. My thesis is that the higher education system is one of the weak links, if not weakest link, in the forest land-use policy formulation process in Newfoundland. To examine and clarify this position, I have conducted a comparative analysis of the higher education systems in three peripheral jurisdictions that have much in common: Newfoundland, Tasmania, and Alaska. Each is peripheral in their respective federation, has a population of approximately one-half million, and has a comparable forest land-base and industry. The comparative analysis consisted of an: assembly, review, and analysis of relevant documents; on-site reconnaissance in Newfoundland, Tasmania, and Alaska; and interviews with non-replaceable respondents. Specifically, I analyzed the teaching, research, and service functions of the higher education system and how they relate to the integrated forest land-use policy formulation process. It is concluded that overall Newfoundland's higher education system has contributed less to the integrated forest land-use policy formulation process than the systems in Tasmania or Alaska. For teaching, Memorial University of Newfoundland has the least number of related faculties and departments, offers no professional or graduate level degrees in land-based renewable resource management, and has the least number of related individual courses. Memorial University has also conducted less research on related policy topics. As well, related service functions fall behind contributions made by the University of Tasmania and are roughly on a par with the University of Alaska. From this comparative analysis, I have begun construction of a conceptual framework that places higher education and natural resource public policy formulation in a wider context. It is suggested that there may be an imbalance between liberal, scientific, and professional approaches in the higher education system and that this may have significant implications for natural resource/environmental policy formulation and implementation. This study is original in two respects. It is the first research project to compare Newfoundland, Tasmania, and Alaska; and it is one of the first, if not the first, empirical study to examine linkages between the higher education system and formulation of forest land-use policy.
Forestry, Faculty of
Graduate

The study aimed to investigate why police officers engage in corruption, the role of trust in facilitating and bonding officers together to allow them to participate in large-scale or serious corruption, and the network structures that result from these relationships. The findings revealed that officers collaborated and operated under a network structure reinforced by a subculture of unwritten rules, codes and acceptance by senior officers. This network was found to be dynamic, shifting in structure, membership and activity, but remained highly clustered and cohesive around a few core actors in the network. Additionally, the corruption network operated on relationships based on collaborations of trust. Officers used trustworthiness attributes, personal experience and third party information to assess whether a fellow officer was trustworthy enough to be a member of the corruption network, which resulted in a ‘pipeline’ of trust.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the role of science and public participation in environmental policy-making processes in Australia. To this end, I analyse the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) process, a recent Australian Federal Government initiative designed to resolve a longstanding dispute over native forest use and management. Theoretically underpinned by an open systems approach, the thesis employs a case study method for the analysis of the RFA process, using data from three distinct sources; interviews, RFA-related literature, and media content. The analysis of the RFA occurs against the historical background to this policy process and in context of contemporary discussions on science and public participation in natural resource conflicts. Interview data is used for the construction of a meta-narrative of the RFA from multiple stakeholder perspectives as a means of learning about the inclusiveness of, and the treatment of science during, the RFA process. The interview data is analysed using an adaptation of discourse analysis, the findings of which are integrated with information derived from the other data sources. This combined data set is then used to inform a systems critique of the Western Australian RFA process in view of gauging its perceived strengths and weaknesses. The analysis reveals a sense of systemic failure in the management of the Western Australian RFA, pointing towards a process and governing structures which constrained opportunities for stakeholder input and deliberation-based decision-making. A range of cultural, socio-political, and personality-based issues are seen to have given rise to constraints, underlying which is found to be an economic rationality subtly driving a systemic closure of political structures and processes. The resultant degree of closedness is shown to have caused an insensitivity of the political apparatus towards community opposition to, and scientific concerns about, commercial forestry, which is understood to have contributed to the social and political rejection of the process and its outcomes. In this thesis I unearth a paradox arising out of the political need to reduce and simplify the complexity inherent in messy socio-ecological affairs but in doing so adding ii complexity due to political over-simplification. The findings suggest that the political process depends on the trimming of complexity for pragmatic reasons but that, at the same time, the politicality of such closure demands deliberative approaches to negotiate the terms of closing so as to attain sustainable process outcomes. This thesis echoes calls from the literature in support of political and scientific pluralism. An opening of political structures and processes is suggested to enable and facilitate active stakeholder participation and decision-making. Similarly, it is argued that science also needs to become more open towards alternative, yet equally valid, modes of knowing and understanding so as to avert threats to its relevance and trustworthiness in political processes dealing with complex socio-ecological problems. Complex problems demand problem solving with requisite complexity. An openness of politics and science and the processes they engage in invites variety of perspective, which in turn increases capacity to deal effectively with socio-ecological messes. Finally, this thesis understands the dominance of economic rationality as a constraint for environmental policy-making, working against notions of openness and plurality and thus precluding trans-formational change in the structure, mode, and outcomes, of political decision-making. For its implicitness this constraint has so far defied needed societal reflection on its implications for science, society, politics, and nature, which is why this thesis stresses the need for explication and for searching pathways towards more balanced rationalities in policy making processes.

This thesis explored how biophilic urbanism, or the integration of natural features into increasingly dense urban environments, has become mainstream in cities around the world. Fourteen factors uncovered through a case study investigation provide insight for decision makers and change agents in Australia to use biophilic urbanism to address impacts of population growth, climate change and resource shortages. The thesis uses an inductive research approach to explore how barriers to the integration of multi-functional vegetated and water design elements into the built environment, such that these become and standard inclusions in urban design and development processes.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2004.
Title from electronic document (viewed 15/6/10) Presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Western Sydney, 2004. Includes bibliography.

Changes in access to natural resources impact the people and communities reliant on those resources for their livelihood. Australia's Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs), signed between 1997 and 2001, aimed to rebalance the productive use and conservation of commercially valuable public native forests. They resulted in reduced access to these forests for wood production, along with other changes, and were accompanied by mitigation strategies intended to assist those most impacted to adjust to the changes - particularly forestry businesses, their employees and rural communities. Despite the significance of the RFAs to Australian forest policy, little ex-post facto (after the fact) social impact assessment (SIA) has been conducted to monitor social impacts and evaluate the mitigation strategies. I conducted an ex-post facto SIA, investigating the social impacts experienced by members of the native forest industry in upper north-east New South Wales and south-west Western Australia as a consequence of RFAs and associated changes. While other groups were also affected, I focused on these groups due to the complexity of analysing social impacts and a focus on in-depth, rather than broad, analysis. I interviewed owners of, and workers employed by, forestry businesses affected by the RFAs; government employees responsible for industry management and regulation; and representatives from industry, community and environmental groups. I used an adaptive theory approach, encouraging an iterative process of data collection and analysis in conjunction with critical review and modification of current theory. Research findings are presented as four papers. The first two papers analyse the social impacts experienced by participants in the two case study regions. In each case, social impacts manifested both as a result of the policy negotiation process and the final outcomes of that process, beginning prior to the completion of the RFAs and evolving over time. Social impacts were experienced cumulatively, and included tangible (physical) and intangible (symbolic or psychological) elements. These results highlighted the multiple interacting factors that influenced how people experienced and responded to the RFAs and associated changes, including personal factors, the provision of mitigation strategies, and additional changes in the forest industry. The implications of the findings for SIA theory and practice are analysed in the third and fourth papers. The third explores the complex nature of cumulative social impacts that result from multiple policy processes and the influences of external factors and individuals' responses. It draws on results from the Western Australian case study to present a framework for the assessment and management of cumulative social impacts, adapted from a framework developed for the mining sector. The fourth paper evaluates the mitigation strategies implemented in the two case study regions, and identifies implications for designing, implementing and monitoring future mitigation strategies. These four papers contribute to understanding the complexity of social impacts and provide lessons for those involved in negotiating and introducing change, and assessing, managing and monitoring social impacts. Acknowledging this complexity and the consequent difficulty of predicting social impacts encourages ex-post facto SIA as a critical learning opportunity, the results of which contribute to SIA theory and practice.

Australia's plantation forest estate expanded rapidly between 1995 and 2008, consistent with the intentions of the National Forest Policy Statement and Plantations for Australia: the 2020 Vision. The near-doubling of the plantation estate, to almost 2 million hectares, was financed largely by small-scale investors under favourable tax and investment arrangements. Almost all the plantations were short-rotation eucalypts grown for woodchips. Expansion of these 'simple' plantation forests coincided with the emergence of new domestic policy initiatives in many arenas of relevance to Australia's forestry sector, which also sought to drive the internalisation of production externalities across much of the Australian economy. Thus, the plantation sector was exposed to emerging and often contentious policies governing water use, the sequestration of greenhouse gases and the delivery of other environmental services, as well as changes in the tax policy settings. This thesis explores the policy settings which might favour the establishment of plantations to deliver multiple goods and services, rather than just the production of wood, and the analytical framework for assessing the economic implications of those settings. A typical economic approach for testing policy impacts is cost-benefit analysis. Such an approach is insufficient to capture the interactions between multiple policy arenas. A more sophisticated integrated analytical framework was required to address this challenge and investigate the tension and synergies in tax, water, climate change and environmental services policies. The analytical framework made it possible to assess their likely net effects influencing private sector decision makers, measuring the effects in terms of the financial returns, volumes and types of wood grown, and the flow of environmental service such as the amelioration of salinity or dis-benefits such as the impacts on catchment water yields. The bias in recent investment towards short-rotation plantations was demonstrated to be a consequence of the tax and investment rules, and the lack of policy enabling factors: there was no requirement for growers to internalise their water use as a factor input, no national market for trading carbon credits, and no means for realising the value of environmental services provided by plantations. By integrating multiple policy elements into a single analytical framework, it was possible to estimate the net effects of proposed and alternative policy settings, and to suggest particular changes for reducing the policy bias towards short-rotation and single-purpose forestry. Changes to the tax rules would provide equal treatment for all plantations, encourage more efficient water use and carbon sequestration within the forestry sector, and indicate where incentives might be best used to encourage targeted investment in plantations that also deliver environmental services. The structure of the integrated analytical model makes it possible to incorporate other policy dimensions relevant to forestry into the assessment framework, such as investing in roads or other public infrastructure. While an advantage of using this approach is a greater capacity for quantifying the net effects of multiple policy settings, a major challenge is accessing the information necessary to build and maintain such a framework.