Sustainability governance by Australian local governments: planetary health in the Blue Mountains

Abstract

Blue Mountains City Council (BMCC) is the local government which presides over the Blue Mountains local government area, an administrative area located on Dharug and Gundungurra Country in the Great Dividing Range west of metropolitan Sydney. BMCC has a decades-long legacy of nature-centred policy and has adopted planetary health as a strategic lens, organising concept, and basis for revived dialogue in their community about enacting ambitious sustainability. BMCC’s use of planetary health constitutes a world first for a local government entity, as far as is known. This makes the Blue Mountains an internationally relevant case study to develop empirical knowledge about planetary health as a local sustainability governance framing. Policy scholarship on planetary health has focused on international frameworks and principles, with limited local and applied studies engaging citizens to develop social constructions of planetary health. My Doctorate of Cultural Research (DCR) portfolio begins to address these gaps. I tested the efficacy of planetary health for engaging citizens about experiences, attitudes, and values associated with the complexities of environmental change. I analysed the governance implications associated with using the concept of planetary health, including whether it can overcome shortcomings associated with the notion of sustainability. Shortcomings include its conceptual fluidity and being open to co-option by those disinterested in stewardship of nature. BMCC is itself a case study of an Australian local government experimenting with a new sustainability governance approach. A further aim of this research was to develop a contemporary perspective on how proactive Australian local governments are approaching and enacting sustainability governance. For this enquiry into social constructions of planetary heath in the Blue Mountains, two surveys were conducted: one collecting a statistically representative sample online in 2020 (n = 293) and the other conducted in person in 2022 to enable semi-structured dialogue (n = 85). To understand how proactive local governments are approaching sustainability governance, I conducted interviews with three local government associations and seven local governments as case studies. This study found that planetary health would likely have conceptual resonance in the Blue Mountains community. Results of both surveys point to a consistent desire for government leadership on environmental and sustainability matters. My research demonstrates that planetary health can be a constructive framing for sustainability, as it doesn’t only describe a policy or community objective, but is also an embodied and personal experience. In analysing the sustainability governance approaches of proactive Australian local governments, almost all referred to the need for significant change in how sustainability was conceived of and enacted to deliver much more substantial gains in protecting nature. Future research can build on this DCR and other empirical studies on nature values to develop a better knowledge of the conditions under which nature and planetary health values influence cultural change, whether the framing of values through a planetary health lens is strong enough to change behaviours, and whether planetary health values would be prioritised over other value sets that drive environmental decline.

Date of Award	2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Juan Francisco Salazar Sutil (Supervisor)