Values, environmental integrity, and sustainability : the advocacy coalition framework and the management of Tasmania's coast

Tasmania as an island state with a coastline of almost 5,000 kilometres. The State Coastal Policy 1996 (the Policy) was developed as a political and policy response to deep and longstanding tensions between promoters of development in the coastal margin and the protectors of its natural environment. The State’s resource management and planning system, with legislated pillars that promoted sustainable development, environmental protection, and cooperative management, was entrusted with oversight of resource management and planning which included the creation, maintenance, and implementation of State policies of which the State Coastal Policy 1996 was the first.
This research examines the development of the Policy in the context of Tasmania’s contested debates over environmental protection, focusing on the constraints that require attention to principles of public participation, economic development, and environmental protection, in a highly contested policy space. The maintenance of Policy was and is an essential part of its operation. After a review of the effectiveness of its implementation, the State Government was required to review the Policy itself at least every five years thereafter.
Since no Tasmanian government has completed any of the 2004, 2010 and 2013 reviews, the policy has effectively stalled. This thesis, therefore, seeks to examine what happened in the context of Tasmania’s political history and why, given the history of failure of repeated attempts to review and revise it; the key conundrum was that every review proceeded according to the legislated prescriptions until the point where the review was terminated without conclusion the reviewed Policy either confirmed or a revision adopted.
The thesis, then, seeks to answer the single research question: How did successive Tasmanian governments consistently fail to complete a legislated requirement to review the Tasmanian State Coastal Policy?
It seeks to identify actor’ perceptions of political, economic, and social conditions that generate policy shocks and other influences and their potential to change the advocacy of policy expectations. Coastal zone management policy, at all points of its making, maintenance, and implementation in Tasmania, is affected by people who seek to influence its outcomes according to their preferred expectations that align with their understanding of the ends they believe the Policy should achieve.
The theoretical approach to this problem considers competing advocates’ and advocacy coalitions’ approaches to the process reviewing the Tasmanian State Coastal Policy 1996 using the Advocacy Coalition Framework. The research therefore entailed the collection and assembly the contributions of actors who engaged in the public discussion of coastal management issues in the Tasmanian media, made representations to the various reviews of the Policy from its 1990s proposal stage to 2013 when the last review effort was initiated. These data were interrogated to locate actors’ differing expectations of a working coastal management regime and compares their goals with the reality of outcomes as they have developed over the study period. The research is framed through the adoption of the Advocacy Coalition Framework as a vehicle to describe and explain how actors and advocates contributed to an exploration of decision-making and policymaking in a highly contested policy space.
That the five-yearly review, which began in 2004 has not been finalised is, arguably, a failure linked to the political and decision-making challenges inherent in the implementation of a policy that seeks to simultaneously address environmental protection and economic development as its principal objectives.
The thesis finds that although there is widespread support for a successful coastal policy in Tasmania, its implementation has been severely compromised since its inception. Most importantly, the research posed the possibility that the ACF, rather than being a linear, two-dimensional framework, could be reimagined as three-dimensional and dynamic. This analysis suggests that future research seeks to establish directions for further research that may lead to an effective implementation of a comprehensive coastal zone management strategy.