Kempsey, New South Wales : How social and political divisions in Kempsey’s early history impacted the town’s economic and environmental development to 1865, and its ongoing susceptibility to disaster

This study addresses the question: how did social and political divisions influence the
 economic and environmental development of Kempsey during the colonial period up
 to 1865? Primary documents including personal letters, journals, memoirs, political
 and governmental papers, along with a range of colonial newspapers have been
 studied and interpreted to form a social historical solution to the question. Due to the
 range of sources available for this investigation, a variation of methodologies has been
 employed, with particular emphasis on an empirical qualitative analysis. In addition to
 considering existing non-scholarly thematic histories of the Macleay Valley, this
 thesis draws existing scholarly investigations together and builds upon them, looking
 into the interdependence between society and environment, politics and geographical
 developments, culture and social movements to piece together the story of Kempsey
 and uncover the key events which have led to long lasting impacts on the town. No
 other scholarly study of this kind has been undertaken to bring the entire complex and
 multifaceted story of Kempsey’s early years into one scholarly investigation.
 Implications for this study highlight the important factor that powerful social and
 political divisions in a community have when important decisions about town
 planning, environmental protection, and issues of social justice need to be addressed.
 These divisions can lead to catastrophic outcomes that could impact generations to
 follow, as shown in the tumultuous history of Kempsey, New South Wales

Creating change in government to address the social determinants of health: how can efforts be improved?

Background - The evidence base for the impact of social determinants of health has been strengthened considerably in the last decade. Increasingly, the public health field is using this as a foundation for arguments and actions to change government policies. The Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach, alongside recommendations from the 2010 Marmot Review into health inequalities in the UK (which we refer to as the ‘Fairness Agenda’), go beyond advocating for the redesign of individual policies, to shaping the government structures and processes that facilitate the implementation of these policies. In doing so, public health is drawing on recent trends in public policy towards ‘joined up government’, where greater integration is sought between government departments, agencies and actors outside of government. Methods - In this paper we provide a meta-synthesis of the empirical public policy research into joined up government, drawing out characteristics associated with successful joined up initiatives. - We use this thematic synthesis as a basis for comparing and contrasting emerging public health interventions concerned with joined-up action across government. Results - We find that HiAP and the Fairness Agenda exhibit some of the characteristics associated with successful joined up initiatives, however they also utilise ‘change instruments’ that have been found to be ineffective. Moreover, we find that – like many joined up initiatives – there is room for improvement in the alignment between the goals of the interventions and their design. Conclusion - Drawing on public policy studies, we recommend a number of strategies to increase the efficacy of current interventions. More broadly, we argue that up-stream interventions need to be ‘fit-for-purpose’, and cannot be easily replicated from one context to the next

Vernacular knowledge and environmental law: cause and cure for regulatory failure

The Australian environment and agriculture is suffering from land degradation and declining biodiversity. Laws protecting native vegetation are aimed at addressing these problems but have been resisted by farmers, compromising the social agreement necessary for regulatory success. A case study drawing on farmer interviews in central northern New South Wales reveals that the laws are considered to be underachieving environmental outcomes since they are ill-suited to local conditions. The low feasibility of the rules is also undermining rule and state legitimacy. Regulatory resistance is due to the lack of recognition of place-specifics by government and laws that impose universal requirements. There is an epistemic distance between the bureaucratic knowledge held by government and the vernacular knowledge (place-based knowledge) of heterogeneous environments held by farmers. Incorporating vernacular knowledge so that laws are more geographically sympathetic may close vernacular disjunctures and cure regulatory failure

The Formal and Informal Orders in Land Clearance Regulation in Australia

Regulation of land clearance in Australia is attempting to curtail the big three environmental threats facing humanity: the enhanced greenhouse effect, biodiversity losses, and land degradation/desertification. This paper will review the current legislative regimes in place to reduce the rates of land clearance and some of the reasons why they have fallen short of generating compliance and, therefore, regulatory success. Chief amongst these are the "disconnects" between the "informal" codes or orders of behaviour upheld by norms within the regulated community, as well as the regulators, and the "formal" order of norms promoted by legislation. This paper will also describe how past regulatory failures may herald a future of regulatory success resulting from the development of a culture of learning and professionalism within agencies charged with implementation and enforcement. As a consequence, the narrowing of the gap between the formal order of the law and the informal order of society will likely occur

The other is us: Conservation, categories and the law

Categories are constructs that become normalised. Binary categories are hierarchical and normative: the bad is “them” and the good is us. Biodiversity conservation is predicated on provenance-based classifications of plants into native and introduced species. This duality is enforced in Australia by the colonial legal system, which is largely unaccommodating of pluralism and mainly antithetical to conservation. However, coarse plant classifications are challenged by the weedy-ness of some native species. Belated and partial recognition of invasive native species’ exceptions to the dominant duality have not challenged underlying assumptions and have caused perverse outcomes. These consequences are evident in a place-based case study conducted in regional New South Wales (NSW). The methodology is sensitive to non-human agency and is employed here to “ground-truth” the law. The results demonstrate that disagreements between local landholders and the law reflect the disjuncture between law and place. The analysis suggests that greater recognition of “place law” may reveal the inherent bias of the dominant legal system, as, in addition to imposing a hierarchy of plants, it is predicated on a human–nature binary and enforces its own class of primacy and privilege. It is this “othering” perpetrated by “us”, the settler state, that must be problematised, rather than the plants

When the heavenly gaze criminalizes: satellite surveillance, land clearance regulation and the human-nature relationship

'Whenever there are men competent for the task, let them be given forest to cut down in order to improve our possessions' (Charlemagne). Many changes wrought by humanity on the environment have involved not only a dramatic change in its physical appearance and composition, but also cultural and institutional changes, for example in the view of the value of property as expressed in the extract above. In countries such as Australia, higher prices and commodity values have usually been placed on privately owned production landscapes with only the extraordinarily exquisite, or discarded leftovers remaining in public ownership. In the latter, limits have been placed on human activities and, at the same time, the purpose for exclusion is expressed in terms of the benefits to humanity. The world's first reserve, Yellowstone National Park in the United States, was declared in 1872 with the objective of preservation 'for the benefit and the enjoyment of the people'

Tertiary teaching: The Ungovernable Profession?

Tertiary teaching is regarded by some as a necessary evil of an academic career rather than as a profession with attendant standards and obligations. The tertiary teaching sector lags behind the primary and secondary, which worldwide have developed codes of conduct. A hippocratic oath for teachers along the lines of "first do no harm" would arguably be "first let me not disable my students." However in practice the opposite has been sometimes true. Traditional (and, some contemporary) methods may include lofty objectives, but these have not always been achieved, or achievable, and some have backfired spectacularly. Demands for "quality" teaching have been growing in an increasingly commoditized educational landscape. But what are these "qualities" and what do they require? Should they be regarded as ethical requirements? As legal requirements? How do the duties to student and self interact with duties to employer institutions? In the tertiary sector it has long been considered sufficient to hold a doctorate to practice. Does this culture mean that tertiary teaching is the ungovernable profession? This paper covers the current state of play with regard to professional standards and outlines a possible way forward for governance of the tertiary teaching profession in the context of a changing future for the tertiary sector

Place-thinking: the hidden geography of environmental law

Environmental law and its students stand accused of ignoring space. The degree of reflexivity given to law by jurisdiction, history, political favour and case-by-case flexibility is chimeric rather than substantive, serving only to further ensure law's hegemonic attempts to conceal geography and to silence non-human voices. This chapter will demonstrate how analyses of vernacular knowledge and plant perspectives in particular unsettle the universalist, anthropocentric and essentialist gaze of environmental law, while at the same time offering explanatory power hitherto concealed. An alternative methodological pathway for the interrogation of environmental law, revealing its hidden tenets and consequences, as well as a potential opportunity for reform, is presented. To transform its vision and impact environmental law must interrogate its universalist, essentialist, anthropocentric and also utilitarian assumptions. Such a transformation involves a finer-grained attendance to geographical conditions, including not only spatial but also temporal diversity, change and emergence, as well as the incorporation of non-human perspectives and a de-centring of the human. Such lessons of contextualization and deep democratization have relevance for law and policy analysis more generally

Legal geography, geography and the research-policy nexus

This commentary concentrates on an area to which legal geography may be especially able to contribute, the research-policy nexus. The pursuit of relevance that characterised geography in the 1970s has re-emerged as a concern with growing demands for evidence-based policy. Geographers have long engaged with the policy arena and legal geography offers another opportunity to enhance this contribution. There are, however, barriers and tensions between researchers and policy makers which need to be acknowledged and addressed