The regulation of direct foreign investment in the Australian mining sector

Although Australia has relied on foreign capital and multinational corporations to develop its mining sector, it has been successful in restricting foreign ownership and control to 50 per cent The Australian experience provides a valuable case study because its successive minerals and energy booms in the last two decades occurred before and after restrictions were imposed and the Foreign Investment Review Board established in the mid‐1970s. During the prior minerals boom when there were virtually no restrictions, levels of foreign ownership and control increased from less than 30 to 50 per cent. During the second energy boom, in the late 1970s to early 1980s, a firm policy of 50 per cent Australian participation in all mining projects was successfully implemented. Australia did not become a ‘client state’ of international capitalism, nor did its federal system preclude the regulation of foreign investment The article summarises the results of Australia's regulatory policy and examines the political and policy reasons for its success.     

The Independent Regulatory Commissions Fifty Years After Humphrey's Executor v. U.S.

The independent regulatory commissions, as a group, constitute one of the most unusual appendages of the federal government. Fifty years ago, these commissions faced a serious and direct challenge at the hands of a popular and aggressive chief executive. Today the commissions are faced with other, but somewhat analogous, challenges. This article describes current issues in agency-executive branch relationships, and suggests points of focus for assessing the advantages and disadvantages of the independent form.     

The Reorganization of Russia's Environmental Bureaucracy: Regional Response to Federal Changes

In documenting the merging of the State Committee for the Protection of the Natural Environment (Goskomekologiya) into the Ministry for Natural Resources (Minresursov), Peterson and Bielke (2001) made several predictions as to the merger's impact on environmental protection within the Russian Federation. Utilizing research undertaken approximately two years after the merger, this paper examines the reaction and response to these federal changes from a variety of actors at the regional level, using Samara Oblast as a case study. In so doing, it highlights the potential disparity and distance between decisions made at the federal level and their implementation locally. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H10, O13, Q20. 1 figure, 26 references.     

The New Nature of Things? Canada's Conservative Government and the Design of the New Environmental Subject

Since coming to power in 2006, Canada's government under Stephen Harper has worked to recalibrate federal regulatory, legislative and economic development frameworks as they overlap in the littoral zone of the environment. We argue that Harper's Conservative government is pursuing a totalizing strategy in reconfiguring the desired Canadian environmental subject. This strategy approaches an integrated design that eclipses the incremental strategic options most Canadian federal governments have understood themselves to be constrained by. This design's basic features include the discursive strategies employed to collapse “the environment” into a singular resource extraction paradigm, a programmatic concentration of power to the executive branch of the Canadian government, and a classical conservative ideology that associates environmental regulation and management with dominion over and improvement of national territory, to the exclusion of other frames and relations. We query the articulation of consent and certainty in relation to the environment and extractive economies in Canada.     

Environmental governance and private actors: enrolling insurers in international maritime regulation

Government programmes have always relied on the enrolment of intermediate actors, both public and private, in the regulatory process. An increasing recognition that the form of implementation is as important as the passing of new legislation means that these actors are increasingly the focus, rather than just the means to an end, of regulatory programmes. This is particularly the case in international maritime environmental regulation. In this paper I examine how the enrolment of private actors takes place, both discursively and through the use of incentives and sanctions. I focus in particular on the use of liability and compulsory insurance and examine the conditions necessary for an environmental insurance market to function. I then take one set of private actors—Protection and Indemnity (P&I) Clubs which insure shipowners' third party liabilities—and look how international government institutions create (dis)incentives and discourses that encourage the P&I Clubs to act in favour of regulatory goals. The contingent nature of regulation means there is an increasing feedback in which P&I Clubs are allowed to contribute to the framing of specific government programmes in the name of practical implementation, but this must be balanced against the risk of allowing private interests to determine ultimate policy objectives.     

News Photographs and Environmental Agenda Setting

Who and what influences the issues that policymakers attend to is central to the question of how power is exercised in politics. This study builds upon research by Soroka that proposes an expanded model of agenda setting as a means to examine how the media influences issue salience for the public and policymakers. It expands on Soroka's model by investigating the hypothesis that photographic attention to environmental issues in the news media influences issue salience for the mass public and governmental decision makers. There is little research that substantiates the idea, but it is widely believed that photographs have influence on the policy agenda. I use a dynamic, multidirectional model to estimate whether the volume of news photographs, in addition to news stories, influences issue salience among the mass public and policymakers. Data are longitudinal and measures of attention are operationalized as the number of congressional committee meetings, concern for the environment as a “most important problem” in public opinion polls, environmental news stories in The New York Times, and environmental news photographs in Time magazine. Results suggest that photographic attention does influence environmental policy agenda dynamics in some counterintuitive ways that are distinct from the effects of the news stories. While news stories appear to increase public attention toward the environment, they have little influence on policymaker attention. News photographs, on the other hand, appear to drive congressional committee attention but elicit an ambivalent public response.     

INFLATION, PROGRESSIVITY, AND STATE INCOME TAX REVENUES

The combination of progressive income tax structures and inflation has led to significant increases in state income tax revenues. While the federal government has de facto indexed the federal personal income tax, states have generated large relative and absolute increases in their income tax revenues. This paper shows that the ratio of income tax revenues to personal income has grown significantly more in states with progressive income tax structures than those with proportional tax structures. Almost half of such increases may be attributed to inflation. The increase in the relative share of income tax as a source of state revenues has recently run into resistance in some states which have installed income tax indexation measures. This may suggest that the marginal cost of raising revenue through inflation, relative to other means (taxes), is reaching its limits.     

INTEREST GROUP LITIGATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

During the past decade federal courts have become an important forum for many environmental conflicts. In the early 1970s environmental groups initiated many of these cases, putting government agencies charged with enforcing environmental regulation on the defensive. By the beginning of the 1980s business interests had assumed the offensive, especially at the appellate levels, placing government agencies squarely in the crossfire of the two groups. Federal judges tended to treat the opposing interests even-handedly, although the plaintiff in a case tended to have an advantage. It appears that environmental groups will be pressed into assuming the offensive once more as federal agencies reduce their enforcement efforts under the Reagan Administration.     

The Campbell Committee and the origins of ‘deregulation’ in Australia

The 1981 Australian Financial System Inquiry, known as the Campbell Committee, is widely seen as the start of the reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Accounts of its origins have been dominated by a debate about which policy actor can take credit. This paper utilises cabinet and Reserve Bank archives to reassess the origins of the Campbell Committee. The inquiry had its origins in an earlier attempt by the Whitlam government to take federal control of the regulation for non-bank financial institutions and the building society crisis of the mid-1970s. In its response to these political and economic challenges we can identify the moment in which the Fraser cabinet turned towards market-based reform. The political decisions made in the context of crisis set the path for regulatory change in subsequent decades, particularly in the area of prudential regulation, where we have seen regulatory consolidation and expansion rather than ‘deregulation’.     

Federalism and Entrepreneurship: Explaining American and Canadian Innovation in Pollution Prevention and Regulatory Integration

Conventional wisdom provides an increasingly strong endorsement of far-reaching decentralization and delegation of authority to bureaucratic agents as the most likely mechanisms to attain such central environmental policy goals as pollution prevention, cross-media regulatory integration, and development of reliable measures of environmental outcomes. Canada would appear an unusually fertile context for such Innovation, given its far-reaching deference to individual provinces and their environment ministries in environmental policy. Comparative analysis of select sub national governments in Canada and the United States suggests that the states in general are far ahead of their provincial counterparts in most of these areas of innovation. Despite all the opprobrium heaped on the American environmental policy system, a combination of federal policy tools and state policy entrepreneur ship appear to contribute directly to this innovation in some states and are almost completely absent in the Canadian system. These findings suggest a need for careful study of the mix of intergovernmental policy tools and principal-agent relations most likely to realize desired environmental policy goals.     

Programming Models for Facility Dispersion: The p-Dispersion and Maxisum Dispersion Problems

The p-dispersion problem is to locate p facilities on a network so that the minimum separation distance between any pair of open facilities is maximized. This problem is applicable to facilities that pose a threat to each other and to systems of retail or service franchises. In both of these applications, facilities should be as far away from the closest other facility as possible. A mixed-integer program is formulated that relies on reversing the value of the 0–1 location variables in the distance constraints so that only the distance between pairs of open facilities constrain the maximization. A related problem, the maxisum dispersion problem, which aims to maximize the average separation distance between open facilities, is also formulated and solved. Computational results for both models for locating 5 and 10 facilities on a network of 25 nodes are presented, along with a multicriteria approach combining the dispersion and maxisum problems. The p -dispersion problem has a weak duality relationship with the (p-1)-center problem in that one-half the maximin distance in the p-dispersion problem is a lower bound for the minimax distance in the center problem for (p-1) facilities. Since the p-center problem is often solved via a series of set-covering problems, the p-dispersion problem may prove useful for finding a starting distance for the series of covering problems.     

Political Decoupling: Private Implementation of Public Policy

Where policy goals can be achieved through regulation of private firms, private provision of public services allows governments to separate public policies from their political costs by shifting those costs to the private sector. Over the past three decades, financial decoupling has emerged as a regulatory strategy for promoting conservation, especially in the energy sector. Decoupling refers to the separation of a firm’s revenues from the volume of its product consumed, which allows companies to pursue resource efficiency free from financial risk. Similarly, when private firms provide public services, they separate public policies from their political costs. This political decoupling allows governments to pursue controversial policies while avoiding their attendant political risks. Applied to environmental policy, this theory implies that potentially unpopular conservation policies are more likely to be adopted and succeed when implemented through private firms. As an initial test of the theory, we analyze California water utilities and their responses to that state’s drought from 2015–2017. Analysis shows that, compared with those served by local government utilities, private utilities adopted more aggressive conservation measures, were more likely to meet state conservation standards, and conserved more water.     

Litigating Agency Change

A study of Forest Service-related litigation and administrative appeals was undertaken to examine their potential roles in effecting change within the Forest Service. The frequency of federal lawsuit decisions involving the Forest Service increased markedly between 1971 and 1993, indicating a dramatic increase in the use of litigation as a tool to force change within the agency, particularly in the Ninth Circuit. Administrative appeals followed a similar increasing trend. An examination of the instigators and purposes of lawsuits found that litigation is used most frequently by environmentalists and most often to block commodity production activities by the agency. Although the agency wins the majority of suits in which it is involved, litigants who initiated lawsuits to stop commodity production activities had higher success rates than litigants seeking to challenge additional environmental measures or to promote commodity production by the agency. A qualitative examination of five National Forest Management Act lawsuit case studies concluded that when litigants are successful in legal challenges against the agency, the court decision often results in substantive on-the-ground changes in management, thereby providing an incentive for additional use of litigation as a means to alter agency actions. These results indicate that the courts and administrative appeals process likely have been significant factors in catalyzing change within the Forest Service.     

Federalism,constitutional recognition and Indigenous Peoples: how a new identity-based state can be established in Australia

ABSTRACT

The debate on constitutional recognition of Indigenous Peoples in Australia has highlighted the desire for meaningful responses to Indigenous Peoples’ claims to sovereignty and self-determination. One potential response is to apply federal principles and establish a new state, or states, for Indigenous Peoples in Australia. This proposal has been most prominently put by Tasmanian Aboriginal leader Michael Mansell. Others have followed. However, (at least) one fundamental problem with this federal idea has not been properly addressed, namely the dispersal and limited geographical concentration of Indigenous people in Australia. This paper asks whether and how federalism can be used to institutionalise the shared and self-rule of widely dispersed minorities, or more specifically, Indigenous Peoples in the settler-majority country of Australia. It demonstrates that a non-territorial approach can be applied to federalism in Australia, and that it may form one possible response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.     

Assessing the Performance of Voluntary Environmental Programs: Does Certification Matter?

The promotion of voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) as alternative approaches to traditional environmental regulation has fueled numerous researchers to evaluate VEP performance. However, these studies have focused on assessing the environmental performance of a single VEP. As yet, we know little about the overall environmental benefits of these programs. Moreover, questions remain about whether VEPs designed with different monitoring regimes—related to whether programs are self‐monitored or undergo external certification—vary in their ability to improve environmental conditions. Using meta‐analysis methodology, this article evaluates the aggregated environmental outcomes of U.S. VEPs drawing on data from nine studies and over 30,000 firms. We show that collectively VEP participants do not improve their environmental performance over nonparticipants. Rather, nonparticipants improve their environmental performance by 7.7 percent more than VEP participants. Additionally, nonparticipants improve the environment 24 percent more than participants in self‐monitored VEPs, whereas participants in International Standards Organization 14001 as a group exhibit inconclusive environmental performance improvements.     

Agricultural Adaptation to Real Regulation on the Urban Fringe: The Chicken Meat Industry's Response to Land‐use Conflict in the Western Port Region of Victoria,Australia

Research theorising the rural‐urban fringe has not focussed in detail on the regulatory system managing land‐use conflict, including disputes arising between agricultural enterprises and residential property owners. To explore local forms of regulation the need to identify relevant actors, their interrelationships and the way that they compete to influence decision‐makers is widely recognised in the literature. Moran et al.'s (1996) conceptualisation of ‘real regulation’, with its emphasis on lobbying by social actors and the (re)formulation of legislation, is identified as a theoretical perspective that can help to explain local forms of regulation. The understanding of patterns of regulation on the urban fringe requires a more detailed conceptualisation of non‐legislative forms of policy, and a greater appreciation of the different strategies adopted by farmers to influence government. This paper investigates how urban fringe agricultural industries have attempted to influence decision‐making within the development approval process. Evidence is presented from the Western Port region in the urban fringe of Melbourne, Victoria, where refusal for the construction of broiler sheds by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has resulted in the chicken meat industry adopting a more scientific siting strategy. It is concluded that, whilst this provides an example of agricultural adaptation and reinforces the importance of adopting a temporal dimension to investigate the land development process, the possibility that government will assess environmental harm differently in the future leaves urban fringe broiler farming in a precarious position.     

Can Voluntary Environmental Regulation Work in Developing Countries? Lessons from Case Studies

Hamstrung by weak institutions that undermine conventional environmental regulatory tools, policymakers in developing countries are increasingly turning to voluntary approaches. To date, however, there have appeared few evaluations of these policy experiments. To help fill this gap, we summarize arguments for and against the use of voluntary regulation in developing countries, review the nascent literature on the topic, and present case studies of agreements negotiated between regulators and leather tanners in an industrial city in Mexico, a national environmental audit program in Mexico, and a national public disclosure program in India. Admittedly few in number, these three case studies nevertheless suggest that although voluntary environmental regulation in developing countries is a risky endeavor, it is by no means doomed to failure. The risks can be minimized by emphasizing the dissemination of information about pollution and pollution abatement options and by avoiding voluntary approaches in certain situations—those where regulatory and nonregulatory pressures for improved environmental performance are weak and where polluters can block quantified targets, individual sanctions for noncompliance, and other widely accepted prerequisites of effective voluntary initiatives.     

Establishing political priority for regulatory interventions in waste management in Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper establishes a multi theory framework to help explain factors and conditions promoting a political priority for policy change. The framework’s analytical utility is illustrated through its application to a case study of waste management in Australia. A lack of political momentum to prioritise regulatory interventions has contributed to uncoordinated responses by the Australian federal and state governments resulting in unsustainable approaches to waste management. Lessons are derived from the analysis that provide insights into the potential for establishing political priority for policy change from uncoordinated voluntary schemes to more coordinated regulatory approaches.     

Performance Goal Achievement in Fiscal Federalism: The Influence of State Partisan Environments and Regulatory Regimes

With tight budgets and hyper‐partisan interactions within and between the states and federal government, attention is being paid to the implementation of federal programs. This is particularly important because, as the recently implemented American Recovery and Reinvestment Act suggests, state administrators are often the implementers of federal policy. This study integrates the fiscal federalism literature with that on implementation and bureaucratic response to examine the effect that within‐state factors have on the degree of performance goal achievement in federally funded, state implemented programs. The findings suggest that, when implementing federal programs, state administrators face conflicting political incentive structures and policy‐specific capacity and capability deficits that influence their motivation and ability to achieve performance goals.     

The Limited Effects of Federal Environmental Justice Policy on State Enforcement

The federal government adopted several measures during the mid-1990s to address concerns about race-based and class-based disparities in environmental protection. This article examines whether these measures affected the pattern of state enforcement of three federal pollution control laws. Using differences-in-differences models to estimate the effects of the federal policy adoption, I find evidence of increases in state enforcement of the Clean Air Act in large African-American communities, but declines in enforcement in communities with large poor and Hispanic populations. Similarly, there is evidence that state enforcement of the Clean Water Act decreased in poor and African-American communities, but there were no real changes in enforcement of facilities regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Collectively, the analysis suggests that the federal policy had minimal positive effects on state regulatory enforcement.