Economic Value Hierarchies in Public and Private Governance: Explaining Australia’s Contested Forest Certification Politics

The paper is structured as follows. In the next section I derive the concept of Sustainability Value from a consideration of the integrated nature of sustainable development and Sustainability and contrast it to conventional political economic and ecological conceptions of value. Noting that Sustainability Value requires balancing its four component values, I consider in section three whether and how this is done in public governance systems focusing on political party type and party ideology. Section four undertakes a similar analysis for private governance organisations (PGOs), focusing this time on comparing them in terms of organisational type and structure.