Weaving a Wicked Discourse: the (mis)framing of Australian Government heritage and sustainability policy

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s Australian national heritage and sustainability policy activity was leading edge but this changed by 1992. The seven interlocking crises of sustainability - biodiversity loss, climate change, global security, pollution and wastes, population, poverty and development and resource use - came to be dominated by the environmental science priorities of biodiversity loss and then climate change in Australian Government policy agendas. Why have some crises of sustainability dominated others and can heritage contribute to balancing out this imbalance in sustainability policymaking in Australia?

This research analyses the representation of heritage and sustainability in three Australian Government policy texts from the perspective of 'authorised discourse'. These are State of the Environment reports (1985-2011), the 'Sustainability Framework' (2012) and the Australian Heritage Strategy (2015). A customised critical discourse analysis technique probes the roles of environmental, economic and policy sciences in Commonwealth conservation-development policymaking to reveal hidden assumptions and practices. In combination with historical survey (1901-2015), interdisciplinary literature review and semi-structured interviews with policymakers and influencers, the work identifies a hierarchy of authorised discourses designed to perpetuate the societal discourse of Ecological Modernisation i.e. optimism about the capacity of technology and economics to use ecology for economic growth and behavioural change in human beings. It exposes methodology-led development in the rapidly expanded sciences as framing all allied discourses and policymaking, including in heritage and sustainability, and evidences the bipartisan closing down of heritage. Elitist behaviour becomes apparent through the operation of an 'econo-enviro discourse coalition', which applies measurable and controllable closed-system approaches to maximally complex, human, open-system problems. This approach marginalises the 'messy' social, including inter-generational, local, political and personal knowledges and identities, and colonises cultural concepts like stewardship, landscape and the wicked problem. This thesis explores the framing of policy, identifies its misframing, and demonstrates the flaws in discourse that have made the resulting policy documents unequal to the tasks of addressing heritage and sustainability.

I argue that the metaphor of stewardship is transferred from governance and environmental science to heritage and sustainability in order to preserve existing relations of power and that the metaphor of curatorship both better reflects the policy process and points a way forward for addressing pressing issues. I suggest that a values-based approach to sustainability policymaking, as in heritage, would enable us to better conduct society-wide conversations to define what we mean by heritage, sustainability and 'the social'. I conclude that such an ontological (rather than epistemological-methodological) approach, positioned through a broadly defined theory of complexity and critical realist philosophy, can facilitate the genuine interdisciplinary and local collaboration now required to equitably address the ecology, economy and society pillars of sustainability - because critical realism values but also questions the assumptions and practices of science. Show more