Sustainability Science Partnerships: a View from the Antipodes

Invited Commentarygeor_597 362..367

Sustainability Science Partnerships: a View fromthe Antipodes

DAVID MERCERSchool of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning, RMIT University, Swanston Street,Melbourne, Vic 3001, Australia. Email: [email protected]

Received 15 April 2009; Revised 6 May 2009; Accepted 7 May 2009

Drawing largely on recent educational and policydevelopments in the UK, Germany, Switzerlandand Austria, de la Vega-Leinert et al. (2009: thisissue) both make the case for, and highlight, thegrowing interest in ‘sustainability science’ in uni-versities, often encouraged by national scienceresearch councils. They also point out that, atleast in the progressive political climate ofWestern Europe, there is now considerablesupport for ‘sustainability science partnerships,inside and external to academia’. While theauthors draw transatlantic inspiration from suchNorth American ‘sustainability’ luminaries asR.W. Kates and W.C. Clark, their essay sitssquarely in the (largely European) tradition ofwritings about eutopia (a preferred real future, or‘good place’) (Dator, 1983). Given that we arenow at the half-way mark into the UN-declaredDecade for Education for Sustainable Develop-ment, their essay is timely and complementsthe recent five-year review of that program(UNESCO, 2009) as well as other assessments ofboth the Decade and its antecedent, environmen-tal education (Sherren, 2008; Venkataraman,2009).

Knowledge for what?My brief from the editor is to make some per-sonal reflections on their thought-provokingpaper, based on the Australian experience. Essen-tially, their essay is about knowledge productionand the relationship between knowledge andpolicy. The changing role and function of univer-sities in society are clearly central to these issues.Lynd’s (1939) classic, Knowledge for What? isnot mentioned explicitly, but his argument is

nonetheless paramount to their discussion: whatideas survive ‘out there’ in the market place andwhat wither and die? . . . and why? Where arekey paradigm shifts generated, how are theytaken up, and how do they spread? At the outsetI should state that, even though I am considerablyless sanguine (especially in relation to the rel-evance of their ideas for achieving the Millen-nium Development Goals by 2015 and theuniversal desirability of ‘partnerships’(Weihe,2008)), there is much in their argument withwhich I find myself in agreement. As Australianscontinue to engage in a healthy conversationaround the form and function of the tertiarysector as well as the appropriate content andemphasis of national curricula in the sciences,geography (Maude, 2009: this issue) and history,their views on the potential transformative powerof formal education will resonate with manyreaders. However, my own opinion on this is that,in this era of excessive ‘psycho-babble’, formaleducation is merely one of the many channelsnow delivering an endless barrage of informa-tion, misinformation, science, pseudo-scienceand propaganda messages of all kinds to a some-times confused and untrusting public, and itoften struggles to compete. The ongoing conflictaround creation science is a clear example of this.A recently-published OECD (2009) survey of400 000 fifteen year-olds in 57 countries, carriedout in 2006, found that while ‘school’ wasusually the main source of students’ informationabout the environment, this varied markedlyfrom country to country. Interestingly, it wasfound to be far less important in Germany andSwitzerland than in Australia, for instance. Other

362 Geographical Research • December 2009 • 47(4):362–367doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2009.00597.x

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commonly-identified sources were family andfriends, the media, and the internet. Moreover,The Nielsen Company’s (2009) report on theglobal footprint of online social networkingfound that the time allocated to accessing socialnetwork and blogging sites grew at over threetimes the overall rate of internet use in 2008.Germany recorded the highest growth rate, whilein Australia the gap between the numbers access-ing the mainstream news/information media, andso-called ‘Member Community’ websites andblogs, is closing rapidly.

Also, as de la Vega-Leinert et al. (2009) pointout, at a time when the global financial andclimate crises have collided with such dramaticforce and we are staring down the barrels of both‘peak oil’ and ‘peak water’, there is an urgentneed – and opportunity – for a new ‘sustainabilityparadigm’. Scientists need to engage much moreactively with institutions and people outsideacademe. These are all worthy sentiments thathave been promoted with mixed success by a longline of Australian academics and commentatorsworking in the broadly-defined environmentalfield. For example, in the true spirit of ‘subversivescience’ (Shepard and McKinley, 1969), from the1970s onwards a small group of socially-awarephysicists, zoologists and engineers at the in-ception of Monash University’s, post-graduateenvironmental science program battled to resistthe entrenched power of reductionist practice rep-resented by the traditional disciplines and facultystructures, and placed transdisciplinary, systems’thinking at the very core of its curriculum (Fisher,2006). Broader-scale institutional experimenta-tion of the same kind was carried out, also withmixed results, from the very beginning of theestablishment (in 1975) of Griffith University’sAustralian School of Environmental Studies(AES) (Franks et al., 2007) and elsewhere.

Both the Monash and Griffith experimentstook off at a time when the Australian universitysector had not yet been assailed by revolutionarygovernment directives to change from a systemcharacterised by the traditional ‘public univer-sity’ to one where the ‘enterprise university’ wasconsidered the norm (Marginson and Considine,2000). Their subsequent experience highlightsthe enormous challenges associated with keepingthe interdisciplinary ‘fire’ burning. At least inpart, declining commitment over time has to beblamed on the professional ‘riskiness’ associatedwith individual academics’ venturing too farfrom the pursuit of narrow specialisms over thecourse of their careers. A steady decline in gov-

ernment funding for the Australian universitysector over recent decades (now, at 40%, thelowest proportion among the OECD countries)has also forced individual researchers anddepartments to engage in a constant quest forexternal, ‘partnership’ funding. Over the decade1995–2005, Australia stood alone among OECDnations in its record of cutting total publicexpenditure on tertiary education. In response,the Chancellor of the University of WesternAustralia, Michael Chaney (who also happensto be Chair of the National Australia Bank) hasrecently urged a much stronger commitment offunds from the corporate sector (O’Brien, 2009).His remarks were made at the opening of the newhome for that university’s business school, partlyfunded by such corporations as BHP Billiton,Wesfarmers and Woodside. This tendency hasprofound consequences for the country’s overallresearch profile and what is valued. Big corpo-rate sponsors are clearly favoured as partners ifonly for the financial largesse and kudos that theybring. But this in turn skews the research agendain a direction that is largely set by the corporatesector and curtails the work of academics whomay wish to align themselves with, and provideexpert advice to, activist groups opposing par-ticular developments (Davies, 2005).

The research/implementation disconnectThrough such august institutions as the CSIRO,Victoria’s (now defunct) Soil ConservationAuthority, and a number of outstanding univer-sity faculties and research networks, Australiahas always had a strong international reputationfor research excellence in many disciplines asso-ciated with the environment. As well, throughsuch bodies as the respected Wentworth Group ofConcerned Scientists (funded by a private phil-anthropic trust), many scientists have had consid-erable success in recent years in getting issues(and often radical solutions) aired in the main-stream media. The ongoing problem is not thequality of the work being drawn upon or our lackof knowledge of, for example, the functioning ofAustralian ecosystems, fire behaviour or climatechange, but how to get the research translatedinto action on the ground. Australia, for example,is now in the grip of its third major wave ofspecies extinction. The second, which lastedfrom the 1890s to around 1956, witnessed theloss of 15 mammal species and only fledglingconcern from a few scientists. In the presentphase there is what Flannery (2009, 14) has

D. Mercer: Sustainability Science Partnerships 363

© 2009 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2009 Institute of Australian Geographers

labelled a ‘rearguard action’ from a new genera-tion of concerned scientists, but ‘so miserable isthe funding, and so immense the task, thatspecies are slipping away before their eyes, evenin the best-protected wildernesses’.

As well, non-Australians, with little apprecia-tion of the domestic lobbying power of the coalindustry, are often bemused by the ‘sunburntcountry’s’ failure to implement wide-scale solartechnologies based on its history of cutting-edgeresearch in this area (Dyson, 2009). Partnershipsbetween Australian universities and commercialenterprises saw the successful, initial develop-ment of solar photovoltaic cells some twentyyears ago. That innovation failed to take off inAustralia but was enthusiastically take up inSpain. Subsequently, we have seen the samething happen with evacuated tube and glazingtechnologies (to China and Japan respectively)and, most recently (in 2007), solar thermalreflector technology to California. The produc-tion of tens of thousands of well-trained scien-tists of all persuasions over the last half-centuryhas also failed to halt environmental degradationin Australia on a massive scale in the same waythat the production of armies of MBAs (100 000each year in the US alone) has been powerless toprevent the collapse of Enron and a host of othercorporations in the recent economic meltdown.

At no time in living memory has there beensuch impassioned debate about the future of con-temporary ‘casino capitalism’, outrage at corpo-rate greed, and so on. Indeed, the global financialcrisis has spurred a robust debate among theleaders of Australian universities about the needto embed an understanding of ethics in curriculaacross all faculties. Hopefully, such renewedinterest will involve greater consideration of therights of the non-human realm, including in thecase of Tasmania, continued encouragementfrom that State’s university administration forstaff to engage in fearless debate around theethics of allowing a proposed new pulp mill toconsume vast quantities of that State’s nativeforest estate. The danger is that the financialcrisis is seen to be so all-consuming that environ-mental issues become totally marginalised. Thereare clear signs of this in Australia at the presenttime with the government – pressured by indus-try groups – using the recession as an excuse fordelaying its implementation of a weak emissionstrading scheme. Again to quote Flannery (2009,17): ‘What should we think of an Australia thatpours $42 billion into a brown economic-stimulus package to save a faltering economy, yet

stands by with hands in pockets as one speciesafter another slides towards extinction?’A recentanalysis of 30 national economic stimulus strat-egies revealed that (at 9%) Australia’s package iswell below the world average (15%) in terms ofthe proportion targeted at investment in climatechange initiatives. China, for example, has allo-cated 40% to ‘green investments’ (Robins et al.,2009).

Australia’s economic and political cultureAcademics, politicians, public servants, entre-preneurs and the like always operate within aparticular political and economic culture, so thatideas and policy innovations that are seen as pos-sible and ‘acceptable’ in one country (or indeed,State) at a given time are not necessarily deemedso in another. Nuclear power, water privatisationand population control are three examples thatimmediately spring to mind. National and Stategovernments can (and do) have an enormouslyimportant strategic role in terms of ‘setting thecompass’ and – as we have seen in the case ofsolar technology – establishing the right condi-tions for particular ideas (including curricula)and policies to flourish or die. In other words,context is everything; and Australia is notEurope!

History provides some classic cases of instant,symbolic policy reversal following changes ofnational government. One of the first acts of thenewly-elected Rudd government in Australia on3 December, 2007, was to sign the Kyoto Proto-col, a modest, symbolic flourish that the decade-long Howard government had not been able tocontemplate. The previous, Howard administra-tion had forged a particularly strong relationshipwith the United States, which helps explain theresistance to signing the Protocol. In addition,the fact that Japan is the country’s leadingtrading partner goes a long way towards under-standing Australia’s reluctance to be more force-ful in its condemnation of on-going Japanesewhaling operations in the Southern Ocean. It isstill relatively early days for Australia under anew government, but all the indications are that‘symbolic politics’ in the environmental sphereare taking precedence over substantive action(Cass, 2008). Given that President Obamaappears to be taking a quite different position onclimate change from that of his predecessor (anda stronger advocacy on emissions’ reduction thanAustralia), it will be interesting to see if Australiaremains as closely aligned with the United Stateson this issue as in the recent past.

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It is also frequently the case that ideas that arewidely regarded as ‘mainstream’ or ‘unproblem-atic’ within the walls of academe can, and oftendo, encounter stiff resistance in the ‘real world’of corporations or the public service. This oftencan come as something of a shock to younggraduates who take up employment in thesesectors, as well as seasoned academics who makethis transition or find themselves sitting on gov-ernment advisory boards. As MacDermott (2008)has recently documented, under the regime of‘new public management’, public servants inAustralia are increasingly disinclined to give‘frank and fearless’ policy advice to their politi-cal masters on such issues as water management,emissions’ reduction or biodiversity decline.

Like some other settler capitalist societies(Argentina and Canada), Australia is widelyperceived as a large, resource-rich, ‘quarry’economy whose primary role traditionally hasbeen to deliver a constant stream of largely unre-fined primary products to the rest of the world.During the course of early settlement, Europeans,too, rapidly displaced and marginalised an Indig-enous population that, over the course of some40 000 years, had acquired, fine-tuned, andapplied its own resilient version of ‘sustainabilityscience’ to survival. Unfortunately, even thoughAustralia has now finally signed the UN Decla-ration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, thereare few positive signs of a good working partner-ship between Indigenous Australians and govern-ments in relation to land management (Lane andWilliams, 2009). At the time of writing, Indig-enous leaders from Far North Queensland areoutraged at an apparent pre-election backroomdeal negotiated between the Queensland govern-ment and the Wilderness Society leading to the‘neo-colonialist’ decision to declare thirteenCape York rivers ‘wild rivers’ without first seek-ing consent from the traditional owners. The con-tradiction between this action and the signing ofthe UN Declaration on the Rights of IndigenousPeoples by the Commonwealth governmentcould not be more stark.

In line with the country’s historical economicrole, mining, agribusiness and national industryassociations like the Minerals Council and theNational Farmers Federation, have graduallyacquired enormous power and political influence.Even though agriculture and mining, combined,now account for only about 11% of the Australianeconomy (down from 75% a hundred yearsearlier), Pearse (2009) has analysed in consider-able detail the ‘sacred place’ occupied by mining

and related industries in contemporary Australia.As we saw in the recent case of the University ofWestern Australia, one manifestation of this hasbeen the long-established practice of forgingstrategic partnerships with public universitiesthrough industry-endowed buildings, professorialpositions and funded research in such areas asengineering, geology, forestry, metallurgy andagriculture. The most recent such initiative is theestablishment of University College London’sfirst offshore campus in Adelaide, in partnershipwith the mining company Santos. Such partner-ships can be deeply problematic for those whomight seek to criticise the environmental or socialimpacts of mining in a State (and university)strongly reliant on the beneficence of that parti-cular industry. Partnership problems have beenitemised by Harman (2001), and additionalexamples whereAustralian university administra-tors have been pressured to censure the results of‘subversive science’ – including the infamousFight for the Forests affair at the AustralianNational University in the 1970s – are detailed inthe edited collection, Intellectual Suppression(Martin et al., 1986).

Pearse (2009) also highlights the long-established, close links between the mining,energy and related industries and governments,political parties, trade unions and conservativethink-tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs(IPA), and reminds us of the persistence of the‘revolving door’ phenomenon, whereby formerMinisters routinely take up positions on theboards of mining and energy companies, as wellas conservative think-tanks. It is hard to overstatethe importance of the IPA, in particular, in influ-encing the parameters of public debate on a widerange of issues (including the environment) overthe last fifty years in Australia (see Smith andMarden, 2008). The IPA has close links withUS-based conservative think-tanks and, as DavidMichaels (2008) highlights in his book, Doubt isTheir Product, there is now a worldwide networkof well-resourced consultancy and public rela-tions’ firms whose sole function is to question,undermine and sow seeds of doubt in the public’smind about established scientific consensus onsuch controversial issues as climate change, thehealth effects of pesticides and the like. Michaelswould be entirely familiar with the tenor ofdebate surrounding the publication of IanPlimer’s (2009) Heaven and Earth, and the kindsof corporate intimidatory tactics against bothindividual researchers and institutions currentlybeing publicly aired in a class action against the



prominent international drug company, Merckand Co., in Australia’s Federal Court (Rout,2009a). Interestingly, this case has highlightedanother worrying trend: the corporate initiationand control of specialist academic journals as aforum for ‘peer reviewed’ articles favourable toa company’s products. In Merck’s case this isthe Elsevier-published, Australasian Journal ofBone and Joint Medicine (Rout, 2009b).

Since the beginning of the twentieth century,Australian governments of all persuasions havealigned themselves closely with corporate inter-ests, have been aggressively ‘pro-development’,and have tended to view with deep suspicion ideasor policies that seek to challenge, however mod-estly, the frontier mentality of ‘statist devel-opmentalism’ (Angel, 2008). Brady’s (1914)Australia Unlimited established the blueprint fordecades of economic boosterism and associatedenvironmental degradation that has continuedup to the present in all the States. At differenttimes the dominant ideology has been openlychallenged by lone individuals such as GeorgeWoodroffe Goyder (in the 1860s), T. GriffithTaylor (in the 1920s) and Bruce Davidson (in the1960s) in their crusades publicising environmen-tal limits and ‘Anglo-Australian cupidity, wicked-ness and waste’ (Marshall, 1966). But invariablysuch people were either ridiculed and ignored or –as in Taylor’s case – forced to leave the country.Indigenous knowledge and understanding of landand water stewardship were also invariably dis-missed. Following Parr (2009), my central argu-ment is that the idea of ‘sustainability’inAustraliahas been largely hijacked by corporate interests,often in alliance with State governments.

Australia and Europe comparedEarlier, passing mention was made of WesternEurope’s ‘progressive’ political culture. Thereare numerous examples relevant to the presentdiscussion that could be used to illustrate theextent to which Australia lags by comparison. Toconclude, I will list just five:

1. Australia’s weak regulatory environment andnegligible implementation of the precaution-ary principle (Peterson, 2006). The EuropeanParliament, for example, has recently regu-lated against the use of nano-particles in foodproduction and has banned the use of atrazineand simazine, herbicides that are used rou-tinely to spray private tree plantations inAustralia and crops such as sugar cane, canolaand maize;

2. Europe’s willingness (in 2005) to launch intoearly experimentation with an admittedly lessthan perfect cap-and-trade pollution reductionscheme, in contrast to Australia’s continuedprevarication on this issue;

3. The history of entrenched constitutional com-petition and antagonism among the States, anissue that has long thwarted integrated watermanagement in the Murray-Darling basin.As well, the lack of constitutional recognitionof local government – the very ‘coal-face’of environmental activity and impact – inAustralia, is in stark contrast to the renewedemphasis on local referenda and an ‘activecitizenry’ in many European countries(Denters and Rose, 2005);

4. European countries’ adoption of robustfreedom of information legislation by com-parison with the weak approach that hasprevailed in Australia for the last twenty-fiveyears; and

5. Australia’s slow progress in developing anenforceable charter of human rights. This is ofparticular relevance to the country’s Indig-enous inhabitants where, increasingly, theargument is being made for a rights’-basedframework to be used in dealings with gov-ernment to replace the long-standing needsframework.

The last three points are fundamental to any dis-cussion of ‘partnerships’. Above all, the idealpartnership is based on trust, shared power andtransparency. All too often these elements aremissing in Australia. We saw this earlier in thecase of recent developments on Cape York, but inclosing I will remind readers of one of the mostspectacular partnership failures in recent times.That was the collapse of the ambitious, nationalEcologically Sustainable Development (ESD)process in the early 1990s. The ESD policyexperiment has been described as ‘the most inten-sive and broad policy process concerning theenvironment in Australia’ (Dovers, 2003, 141).It unfolded in a period that is widely regarded as‘the high point of intergovernmental relations’(Tiernan, 2008, 123). The project ultimatelyfailed largely because its fundamental principleswere perceived by developmentalist, governmentand industry sectors to be deeply antithetical tomainstream thinking around issues of ‘economicdevelopment’ and ‘progress’, and because ofan active oppositional campaign within someof the core bureaucracies to a radical, ‘whole-of-government’ policy framework.

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Goyder, Taylor and Davidson doubtless wouldnot be surprised by any of this but, I feel sure,would be disappointed that a succession of gov-ernments has been so unwilling to face up to theevidence of dramatic environmental decline andmake the ground more fertile for the germinationof a genuinely Australian version of sustainabil-ity science.

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Sustainability Science Partnerships: a View from the Antipodes