Explaining Australia's Contested Forest Certification Politics Fr

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

Fred Gale, University of Tasmania School of Social Science Tasmania, Australia

Paper Presented to the Private Governance and Public Policy in Global Politics Panel, International Conference on Public Policy, Montreal, Quebec, Canada 26-28 June 2019

This is an early draft so please do not quote without permission. The theoretical sections of this paper were previously presented to a Yale University workshop on Private Authority and Public Policy in Global Context: Competition, Collaboration or Coexistence, 11-12 January 2018. The paper has been substantially updated to include the empirical analysis of the Australian FSC case. Comments are welcome and can be forwarded to [email protected]

Introduction Humans swim, usually unreflexively, in a sea of personal values that have their origin in the complex interaction of nature, nurture, political economy and culture (e.g. Wildavsky 1987, Elster 1989, Bowles 1998, Slovic et al 2007). While individuals can shrug their shoulders and agree to disagree when the value stakes are low—over the aesthetics merits of a painting for example—they are equally prepared to discipline, punish or even kill those perceived to be threatening fundamental values. Some of the most intractable political disputes of the post-war era—racial integration, abortion, gay rights, gun control, immigration, McCarthyism, voluntary euthanasia—have their origin in competing, deeply held personal values that, scaled up, pit one community against another. Since agreeing on what constitutes authoritative evidence to resolve such value-laden disputes is often not possible—some appealing to religious texts, others to tradition, and others again to philosophy, law or science—value communities often seek hierarchical, government-imposed resolution. This results in one of the most prominent features of modern democratic politics: policy churn. Right-wing legislation enacted under one administration is overturned by left-wing governments whose acts are later overturned by returning right-wing governments in favour of the status quo ante. Bipartisan agreement is the exception, not the rule, and increasingly hard to achieve in a hyper- interconnected, web-mediated world.

While it is widely recognised that people have differing aesthetic and moral values, it is mostly assumed today that such differences do not extend to conceptions of economic value. This is because most of us now adopt the viewpoint of neoclassical economists which, emerging in the 1870s and consolidated in the 1930s, claims that economic value is nothing more nor less than the value a thing has when it is exchanged for other things (i.e. the price one pays) as determined by demand and supply at the margin.1 The field of environmental economics, for example, analyses ecological degradation in terms of ‘externalities’ and market failures, and proposes market-based solutions like green taxation, carbon trading, payment for ecosystem services and deposit-refund schemes to make nature visible in price signals (Daly & Farley 2011).

1 These were a group of 19th century mathematically inclined political economists that included Stanley Jevons, Leon Walrus and Carl Menger.

Yet, despite the hegemony of the economic idea of exchange value as coincident with economic value, I will argue in the first part of this paper that, properly understood, the concept of sustainable development calls into question the ‘marginalist’ solution to economic value. It does so because sustainability recognises that things have usefulnesses beyond their value in exchange. Building on the history of political economic thinking about economic value (Gale 2018), we can reframe the general concept of economic value as one that involves reconciling the competing usefulnesses things have. Summarising this crudely, a thing can be useful to a group (family, community, nation) for what it directly provides them (use value). Alternatively, it can be useful because it can be traded for something else that is directly useful (exchange value) or because there is substantial human labour embodied in it (labour value). Finally, a thing can also be useful for the role it plays in maintaining the ecosystem of which it is a part (function value). Reinterpreting economic value as a pluralistic, molecular conception of value composed of four interacting and potentially competing value elements—a notion we can term ‘Sustainability Value’—is practically useful. The approach reframes the operational meaning of Sustainability, with enormous consequences for the structure and action of public and private agents. Notably, it highlights how the creation of economic value as Sustainability Value is no longer the provenance of business alone. Indeed, unless business is explicitly aware of the trade-offs involved between realising exchange value, use value, labour value and function value, it is highly likely that the pursuit of former will visit a degree of harm on the latter. Much recent business literature implicitly accepts that this occurs, proposing corporate social responsibility, triple bottom line accounting and circular economy solutions to overcome it. However, business acting alone is failing to deliver Sustainability Value because the incentives it confronts to realise exchange value at the expense of use, labour and function value are too powerful. It is thus only when these latter values are fully and directly involved in establishing the conditions under which production is to take place that Sustainability Value can be realised.

Many will argue that it is the role of the state to determine the conditions under which production occurs. This, importantly, raises the question of the structure and operation of the state in a world aiming to realise Sustainability Value. As I will show below, the liberal democratic state we have inherited from the 19th century is poorly adapted to deliver Sustainability Value, primarily because it temporarily puts in power a government that is ideologically committed to a singular, a priori notion of economic value as primarily the realisation of exchange value, national use value or labour value. Thus, just like business, the party-political democratic state is biased in favour of realising a specific component of

Sustainability Value, although this component varies depending on which party is in power. Liberal parties are biased towards exchange value, nationalist parties towards use value and social democratic parties towards labour value. It is these ideological biases, I argue, that account for at least some of the conflict between public and private governance systems.

Building on the above conceptualisation of economic value as Sustainability Value, the paper investigates the following proposition: that a multi-stakeholder private governance scheme genuinely seeking to balance use, exchange, labour and function value in the pursuit of Sustainability Value will have its legitimacy called in to question by public officials who aim to privilege one of four values over the others. To investigate the proposition, I use the empirical case of the ‘certification war’ in Australia between the Australian Forestry Standard (AFC) (a member of the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC)) and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). First, I compare and contrast how the four component values of Sustainability Value are mediated by AFS and FSC. Then, employing the Manifesto Database Project’s database, I undertake a content analysis of the value hierarchies of Australia’s three major political parties and compare these to expectations derived from ideological theory. Finally, Hansard reports of the debates that took in the Australian Commonwealth (federal) Parliament on forest certification from 2000 to 2018 are analysed to illustrate how the value hierarchies of different political party mediate politicians’ perceptions of the legitimacy of each scheme. The empirical analysis supports the proposition and finds that the centre-right Liberal National Coalition (LNC) and the centre/centre-left Australian Labor Party (ALP) strongly endorsed the AFS’ focus on exchange and labour values and sought to undermine FSC’s legitimacy, while the far-left Greens opposed the AFS scheme but expressed only lukewarm support for FSC’s.

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. In section five, I develop a proposition regarding the goodness of fit of the value hierarchies that emerge from these two different governance

processes. In an extended section six, I test the basic proposition in a case study of forest certification in Australia. This involves analysing the value hierarchies of two private governance schemes (AFS and FSC); three Australian political parties (the Liberal National Coalition (LNC), Australian Labor Party (ALP) and Australian Greens; and then comparing how the value hierarchies of the two private governance schemes interact with the value hierarchies of the three political parties to generate different discourses of legitimacy. The paper finishes with a short concluding section indicating some of the study’s limitations and proposing some further research.

Value Theory in Political Economy The discipline of political economy traces its history back to the eighteenth-century writings of the French Physiocrats such as Cantillon, Quesnay, Mirabeau and Turgot (Higgs 1892) and Scottish enlightenment philosophers, notably Adam Smith. Against a backdrop of mercantilist pamphleteers who claimed that ‘wealth’ measured in bullion required an excess of exports over imports, political economists promoted the alternative idea that it consisted in an expansion of goods and services—in Smith’s word an expansion in the ‘necessaries, conveniences and amusements of human life’ (Smith 1776). For Smith and subsequent economic liberals, the mechanism that best realised this expansion of produce consisted of specialisation and the division of labour, which in turn implied the need for free and open markets to maximise the opportunity to exchange the goods produced for the produce of others. Distinguishing between ‘use value’, ‘labour value’ and ‘exchange value’ within the Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that a society would be wealthy in material terms to the extent that it structured itself to realise exchange value. The governance implications were the ‘nightwatchman state’: a small, law- and-order institution that secured private property rights and individual freedoms to enable instrumentally rational individuals to employ their talents to produce goods and services for sale in the market. In this approach, a thing is economically valuable if it can be exchanged for other things—if it has a market price—implying in turn that the thing is both demanded and supplied in some proportion. Conversely, a thing is economically valueless if it cannot be exchanged in the market—if it does not have a price.

Elements of the liberal conception of economic value as exchange value were subsequently challenged by economic nationalists, socialists and ecologists. Writing in the 1840s and building on the nationalist and protectionist ideas of post-revolutionary America as reflected in Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufactures (Hamilton 1791), Friedrich List set out

5 an alternative way of conceptualising what a society needed to do to ensure its citizens enjoyed access to life’s necessities and conveniences (List 1841). While continuing to view wealth in humanistic and material terms as the expansion of goods and services available to a population, List argued for the necessary curtailing of the drive to realise exchange value when this conflicted with the requirements of national development. Concerned that a state might render itself perpetually vulnerable to coercion by other states if it relied on agricultural exports to pay for manufactured imports, List substituted protectionism for the core liberal policy of free trade. From this perspective, the economic value of a thing could no longer be assumed to be its price as determined by exchange. Instead, a thing needed to be independently evaluated to determine what it might contribute to national development—that is, what its national use value might be. The institutional implications of economic nationalism thus differed from economic liberalism as now it appeared that a more substantive, techno-administrative state was required with a capacity to undertake the necessary independent evaluation, plan the direction of industrialisation and allocate resources for its achievement.

The liberal conception of economic value as exchange value was also disputed by socialists, who built on a key observation by Smith and David Ricardo (1821) regarding labour’s role in the production of value. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that in the ‘rude state of society’ the value of a thing would likely exchange for the amount of labour time embodied in it. In a celebrated example, he compared the exchange value of a deer and beaver, noting that if it took twice as long to kill the beaver as the deer than logically two deer would exchange for one beaver. The basic insight was that things vary in value depending on the amount of labour required to produce them and Ricardo generalised this principle to industrial societies noting that capital existed in nascent form as weapons even in the ‘rude state of society’. Marx (1867), building on Ricardo’s approached, argued that a good conceptualised as a commodity had a double-nature, being at once an exchange value and a labour value. Commodity fetishism consisted in people being obsessed by the exchange value ‘face’ the commodity presented to the world to the detriment of its labour value ‘face’ to such an extent that they completely overlooked the socially necessary labour value bound up in production in favour of what the good might exchange for.

Once again, the institutional implications of this conception of economic value as labour value were significant. Since the goal of a socialist society was the production of use values—things of use to the working class—and since the production of use values necessitated the

deployment of socially necessary labour time, then a state under the control of workers was required to orchestrate the production and allocation of use values. More broadly, the socialist approach can be interpreted as highlighting the contribution of human labour to the production of virtually all human artifacts. Even capital can be reconceptualised as ‘dead labour’, the embodiment in a thing that enhances the production of things of past conceptual and physical labour.

A fourth conception of economic value relevant to political economy is articulated within ecological theory. This is a conception of a thing’s value not to humans as a use, exchange or labour value but as having value deriving from the functional role it plays in a wider system of which it is a part. While early political ecologists such as John Muir, Henry Thoreau and Aldo Leopold employ transcendental and moral philosophy to identify the ‘intrinsic’ value of nature, the idea is better expressed in more recent analyses that focus on the function a thing performs for the wider system of which it is part. The essential idea of this ‘functional’ conception of value (Bengston 1998; Lockwood 1998) is that a thing is now valuable for the role it performs in the wider ecosystem. The institutional implications of this conception of function value are also significant because scientific and secular knowledge is required to assess the degree to which natural resources can be exploited without threatening the wider ecosystems within which they are embedded.

This cursory survey of the history of value theory in political economy and political ecology enables the identification of four different materialistic, instrumental perspectives on the usefulness of a thing. All perspectives are equally valid: a fishery, for example, can be viewed as generating exchange value, national (and local) use value, labour value and function value. However, if is placed exclusively in the hands of a commercial operator, it will be managed for exchange value; a community, for community use value; a workers coop, for labour value; and fisheries ecologists, for function value. Who gets to manage it for what purpose is a key political economic question to which both public and private governance institutions provide often problematic answers.

Value Hierarchies in Public Governance In the modern Western state, power is temporarily placed in the hands of whichever political party secures enough votes to govern. The value hierarchy dominant within a modern state at any particularly moment depends in the first instance therefore on the ideology of the party in

power as interpreted by the leadership. Differences in ideology are captured in a party’s location in a values’ space which many studies now indicate is well expressed across two dimensions: a left-right economic equality dimension and a liberal-conservative, rights- responsibilities dimension (Barnea & Schwartz 1998; Benoit & Laver 2006; Hix et al 2006; Miller & Schofield 2008; Carmines & D’Amico 2014). The former captures electoral positions on such policies as taxation rates, minimum wage levels, unionisation, social security payments and housing policy; the latter on policies such as abortion, racial integration, prayer in schools, gun laws and immigration.

To win office, a political party needs to position itself somewhere along these left-right, socially liberal-socially conservative dimensions. One relatively parsimonious typology distinguishes elite party types from mass and catch-all parties (Duverger 1972) with European and American variations in their structure and operation. Elite parties, as the name suggests, are run by a small and select cohort of party officials who only mobilise the masses at election time. Mass parties, in contrast, seek to involve members in ongoing policy discussions throughout the electoral cycle. Catch-all parties are elitist in structure but entirely focused on winning elections not promoting a specific ideology. Different types of political party are differentially positioned regarding their freedom of movement along the two dimensions. Elite and mass parties are more restricted because they have been formed to appeal to specific interests and social movements. In contrast, the catch-all party has greater freedom because it is non-ideological and concerned only with crafting a winning electoral platform.

Elite parties championing a specific ideology, epitomised in the traditional European political party, have limited options in deciding where to position themselves in the two-dimensional values’ space. They can shift location from right to centre-right (or left and centre-left) and from very-to-somewhat socially conservative (or very-to-somewhat socially liberal), for example but cannot ‘cross the Rubicon’ and position themselves on the other side. The British Conservative Party, with roots in the 18th century Tory constitutional struggle with the Whigs over the nature of ‘responsible government’, continues to express right-wing economic and political values. Illustrating this, in the recent 2017 British General Election, the Conservative Party manifesto’s economic plan commenced with the following statement: ‘A strong economy is built on sound public finances, low taxes, better regulation and free trade deals with markets around the world’ (Conservative and Union Party 2017, p. 12).

Elite parties in the United States, in the form of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, are said to differ from those in Europe in structure and ideology (Duverger 1972). However, a degree of continuity in their value orientations has been noted since they formalised themselves in the early 20th century (Gerring 1998). Thus, for the past century, the Republican Party has expressed support for business owners, a position reflected in the economic statement of its 2016 US Presidential Election platform which commenced with the following words: ‘We are the party of a growing economy that gives everyone a chance in life, an opportunity to learn, work, and realize the prosperity freedom makes possible. Government cannot create prosperity, though government can limit or destroy it. Prosperity is the product of self-discipline, enterprise, saving and investment by individuals, but it is not an end in itself’ (Republican Party 2016).2

In contrast to elite parties, mass parties are formed to represent members’ interests. They are also constrained in their location along the left-right and liberal-conservative spectrums since their goal is to represent the interests of a particular social class or group. In workers’ parties, for example, where members have a much greater say in candidate selection and the content of the party platform than in elite parties, the economic value options are those of the left and centre-left. In the 2017 British election, for example, the Corbyn Labour Party manifesto directly addressed the issue of inequality in the UK. The Party manifesto’s economic plan states: ‘Labour’s economic strategy is about delivering a fairer, more prosperous society for the many not the few…Labour understands that the creation of wealth is a collective endeavour between workers, entrepreneurs, investors and government. Each contributes and each must share fairly in the rewards’ (British Labour Party 2017, p. 8).

From the above analysis, it appears that elite and mass parties of the left and right that dominate much Western electoral politics are ideologically committed to different and distinct value hierarchies and rank order Sustainability Value’s four component values—exchange value, use

2 In contrast, the Democratic Party has sought to build on its New Deal heritage to articulate the values of America’s workers and marginalised. Its economic statement in the 2016 platform expressed ‘social-liberal’ values as follows: ‘Democrats believe we must break down all the barriers holding Americans back and restore the basic bargain that built America’s mighty middle class: If you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead and stay ahead. The system is not working when we have a rigged economy in which ordinary Americans work longer hours for lower wages, while most new income and wealth goes to the top one percent. Republican governors, legislatures, and their corporate allies have launched attack after attack on workers’ fundamental rights to organize and bargain collectively. Too many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and hallmarks of a middle class life—owning a home, having access to affordable and quality childcare, retiring with dignity—feel out of reach’ (Democratic Party 2016). Of course, had Bernie Sanders won the nomination, the platform would have more forthrightly reflected the values of democratic socialism.

value, labour value and function value—differently in their value hierarchies. What about the value hierarchy of the catch-all party? The catch-all party was defined by Kirchheimer as one that had abandoned the efforts of elite and mass parties to gain power on behalf of specific social interests and instead focused pragmatically on developing broad-based, vaguely stated, political platforms that appealed to a sufficient diversity of voters to get candidates elected (Wolinetz 2002). The catch-all party was a response to the ‘end of ideology’ in the West that was in turn a product of the post-war Keynesian welfare state, which pressured left and right alike towards a ‘politics of contented centrism’ (Jost 2006). From this perspective, previously established elite and mass parties become catch-all parties in the post-war period and focused on non-ideological concerns—charisma of candidates, organisational capacity to get out the vote, donor finance, electoral strategy and tactics—the goal being to win enough votes to govern.

To win elections, a catch-all party must figure out ‘what the people want’. This can be achieved by employing political marketing to survey public opinion and political advertising to influence voters’ minds. Private polling and focus groups help assess what issues are at the front of people’s minds, how issues can be ‘spun’ to be compatible with other issues and interests, to identify ‘mediagenic’ candidates and persuasive messages. A catch-all party’s electoral platform will only balance across Sustainability Values’ four elemental value if the leadership calculates that that is what the electorate will vote for. To date, only a minority in any electorate put ‘function value’ at the top of their list. The consequence is that Green political parties never earn more than 20% of the popular vote or gain control of government in their own right as liberal, social democratic and nationalist parties do. From a catch-all party manager’s perspective, there are few votes to be lost in downplaying environmental issues given the relatively small number of voters engaging with them.

While Duverger’s elite, mass and catch-all typology is useful as a heuristic device, in practice political parties today appear to be subtle blends of all three types. They are elitist because only a small number of individuals are genuinely in control; they are mass-based because they seek to tap into social movements of the left and right linked to the environment, workers, business and the nation; and they are ‘catch-all’ in that they all employ a large number of communications professionals to understand and influence public perceptions. There are also good reasons to believe the ‘end of ideology’ thesis of the 1950s and 1960s was overstated and that individuals are ideologically motivated even if they find it hard to specify what these are

in formal political philosophy terms. This observation gains credence from the increasingly partisan nature of Western politics over the past two decades where a resurgent right-wing is challenging many cherished liberal economic and social values relating to free trade, social security, abortion rights and immigration.

In summary, political parties have value hierarchies that predispose them to rank the four economic values of exchange, use, labour and function in a different order. Table 1 sets out an assessment of the formal relationship between political party type and economic value hierarchies and illustrates these with some real-world examples. The conflict between Obama Democrats and Trump Republicans, for example, is a struggle over the priority to be given to exchange value and use value in the first instance. Obama Democrats emphasised the role that open and free markets play in social life and worked hard to support the existing, expanding, neoliberal system of global trade. If Clinton had been elected instead of Trump, the US would likely have finalised the Trans Pacific Partnership to further consolidate trade and investment relations in the Pacific region. The Trump Administration is known for being hostile to global and plurilateral trade agreements and is currently fighting trade wars with China, Europe and South America as part of the overall reindustrialisation strategy. In economic value terms, the Obama Administration prioritised exchange value in its value hierarchy whereas the Trump Administration prioritises national use value. Trump’s affinity with Nigel Farage can be explained by the fact that both he and the former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party share a similar values’ hierarchy.

Table 1: Hypothesised Relationship between Party Type and Economic Value Hierarchies Party Type Use Exchange Labour Function Provisional Examples Elite Parties Conservative-Right High Moderate Low Very Low Trump Republicans Liberal-Centre Low High Moderate Moderate Obama Democrats Mass Parties Workers Moderate Low High Moderate Corbyn Labour Nationalists High Moderate Low Very Low Farage’s UKIP Catch-All Parties Mix depends on balance of values in electorate and Macron’s La République En party leadership calculations as to nature of winning Marché, a centre-right elitist electoral platform government • exchange value=high; • function value=moderate; • use value=low; • labour value=very low.

Value Hierarchies in Private Governance In contrast to the a priori conceptions economic value hierarchies that pervade public governance driven by political party ideology and type, an important feature of some private governance arrangements is that the meaning of economic value is negotiated, often painstakingly, across multiple stakeholders each with a legitimate claim to be representing use, exchange, labour and function value. The degree to which private governance schemes engage in such cross-value brokerage depends to a considerable extent on the scheme’s origins, purposes and structure as well as the processes employed to ensure meaningful and balanced stakeholder input (Tollefson et al 2008; Gale & Haward 2011), so considerable variation is possible.

A PGO’s capacity to deliberate across Sustainability Value’s four value components can be assessed by analysing it across the following dimensions: a) value focus; b) organisational form; c) organisational structure; and d) implementation rules.

The ideal-type PGO is one that aims to integrate all four of sustainability’s component values, is membership based, groups values to ensure value balancing, and adopts rules and procedures to secure actor compliance. Very few PGOs meet these ideal requirements, however, which explains the very uneven performance they achieve in delivering sustainability in practice.

In terms of value focus, many PGOs broker across two or three rather than all four of Sustainability Value’s component values. Operating within supply chains that take for granted that the firm’s dominant objective is exchange value, such PGOs aim to modify the impact of achieving this objective on other economic value components. Organic certification, for example, aims to realise both exchange value and function value by eliminating synthetic chemicals from the supply chain. The original organics’ vision also encompassed the realisation of community use values in the form of a network of small producers linked to local food systems. However, these community use values were sacrificed by ‘big organics’ in a desire to ‘mainstream’ organic production.

Similarly, Fairtrade International’s objective is to ensure a better rate of return to small producers of coffee, tea, sugar, cocoa, bananas and other commodities by eliminating supply

chain intermediaries, setting a floor price, and redistributing resources to local community development. It aims to balance the realisation of exchange value with labour value while also addressing community use value. Fair trade schemes have not been explicitly developed with function value in mind. A recent comparative study by Vanderhaegen et al (2018) of Fairtrade and Organic certification (FT-Org) and UTZ-Rainforest Alliance-4C certification (UTA-RA- 4C) in Uganda found that coffee production under the latter scheme had a range of negative environmental effects on carbon emissions and biodiversity. They conclude:

Results suggest that PSS [Private Standards Systems] do not create a win-win outcome for socioeconomic and environmental sustainability. UTZ-RA-4C certification creates substantial economic benefits but ecological impacts are adverse. FT-Org certification leads to higher carbon stock and biodiversity conservation but reduces productivity and economic returns.

While quite a few PGOs only seek to deliver a single additional value beyond exchange value, some explicitly claim to be delivering sustainability itself. From the perspective of the theory of Sustainability Value developed here, this requires them to fully and adequately balance the realisation of exchange value with use, labour and function value—which in turn requires them to adopt multistakeholder processes that secure the fully participation of constituents representing these values. The Marine Stewardship Council, for example, claims that its certification scheme delivers ‘certified sustainable seafood’, a claim contested within the fisheries science and activist communities (e.g Jaquet et al 2010; Arnold & Roebuck 2017). MSC’s capacity to deliver Sustainability Value appears compromised by its structure and operation. Being a foundation rather than a membership-based organisation means that it can ignore rather than engage with the many criticisms it faces, as it did in response to SeaChoice’s recent, highly critical evaluation of its Canadian operations (Arnold & Roebuck 2017). An organisation initially formed by a partnership between Unilever and WWF-International, its corporate-environmental legacy endures in the structure of a board that fails to secure the equal, balanced representation of community use value, labour value and function value. The result is the kind of political economy of fisheries that Foley describes in Newfoundland, where MSC certification becomes a tool for the processing industry to extend its power over other processors and the broader Newfoundland prawn fishery (Foley 2012).

Table 2 summarises the different ways in which private governance systems organise the four elementary components of Sustainability Value with some real-world illustrations of the

different value combinations. Several points can be made from this classification of values. First, the allegation that certification and labelling schemes endorse a neoliberal approach to managing supply chains reflects the fact that all schemes endorse production arrangements that involve the continued realisation of exchange value. For pure communitarians, socialists and ecologists this is problematic as it threatens the full realisation of their preferred community use value, labour value and function value.

Table 2: Ideal-Type Value Hierarchies in Private Governance Organisations Value Focus Exchange Use (N, C) Labour Function Real World Example Two-Value Exchange-Use High Moderate (N) PEFC Exchange-Labour High Moderate BFSA Exchange-Function High Moderate Organics Three-Value Exchange-Use- Moderate Moderate (C) Moderate Fairtrade Labour Exchange- High Low (N) Moderate MSC Function-Use Exchange-Labour- No example Function Four-Value Four-Value Moderate Moderate (C) Moderate Moderate FSC Key: PEFC=Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification; BFSA=Bangladesh Fire and Safety Accord; MSC=Marine Stewardship Council; FSC=Forest Stewardship Council. N=National Use Value, C=Community Use Value.

Second, while there are real-world proxies for most of the private governance value combinations, these are not pure versions of the ideal-types. The Bangladesh Fire Safety Accord, for example, is confined to Bangladesh rather than the broader retail sector, only seeks to secure improvement to workers’ health and safety (although it does empower unions within the Bangladeshi retail sector) and publishes a list of signatory companies that have signed up to the scheme rather than certifying and labelling the products that emerge from the factories. Likewise, while organic certification aims to realise exchange value and a component of function value by certifying small-scale producers’ non-use of synthetic chemicals, its wider claims to be practising ‘sustainable agriculture’ have not yet been accompanied by changes in its standards or conformity audits, the latter remaining closely tied to the exclusion of non- synthetic chemical inputs (see Ascui, Farmery & Gale, forthcoming).

Third, it is important to distinguish between different communities within the use value category. A scheme that seeks to enhance national use values is one that engages extensively

with national and subnational governments whereas one that addresses community use value engage extensively with local government, Indigenous communities and local community groups. Since conceptions of use value are territorially based, significant conflict can arise between them as when national majorities override the rights and interests of local and indigenous peoples’ groups.

Public-Private Value Hierarchies and Goodness of Fit: An Australian Case Study The above outline of Sustainability Value’s four value components and how these are organised into value hierarchies by public and private governance actors can now be linked to the idea of ‘goodness of fit’. When the value hierarchy of a private governance scheme is similar to the value hierarchy of the government of the day, there is goodness of fit and cooperation will ensue because the private governance scheme endorses the government’s value hierarchy. Conversely, when the value hierarchy of a PGO significantly departs from that of a government, conflict will ensue. Intermediate cases result in coexistence. Building on the information in Table 1 and Table 2, the following specific propositions will be tested in this paper.

Proposition 1: Australian governments managed by parties of the right and left will strongly endorse the industry-backed Australian Forestry Standards (AFS) certification schemes because it prioritises exchange value, labour value and national use value which are compatible with their own values.

Proposition 2: Australian governments managed by parties of the right and left will come in to conflict with the Forest Stewardship Council’s scheme (FSC) because of the emphasis it places on community use value and function value which these parties de-emphasise.

Proposition 3: The Australian Greens will come in to conflict with the industry-backed AFS scheme because it ignores its priority value, function value.

Proposition 4: The Australian Greens will offer condition support to the FSC scheme because it does not fully endorse the party’s function value priority.

Australian Political Institutions To test these propositions, I examine the case of forest certification in Australia. Australian politics operates according to a ‘Washminster’ model with components of both the British parliamentary and American presidential systems. Whereas Australia’s is a parliamentary system in which the leader of the winning political party becomes Prime Minister and presides over a cabinet and a party that votes as a block in the 151-member lower House of Representatives, it is also a federation with a powerful, elected, American-style Senate composed of 12 senators from each of the six states plus two each from the two territories. The

Commonwealth of Australia employs a modified, majoritarian version of the first-past-the-post system in lower house elections where voters rank candidates in single-member constituencies with preferences counted to ensure the winning candidate receives a minimum of 50% plus 1 of the vote. Senators are elected using a single transferable vote (STV) proportional representation system that results in greater minority party representation in the Upper House. An independent electoral commission is responsible for managing elections and reviewing electoral boundaries, minimising opportunities for gerrymandering. One final notable feature of the Australian system is that voting is compulsory and those failing to do so can be find A$20. The result is that turnouts are extremely high, almost always over 90% of eligible voters.

At the federal and state levels, three parties dominate the lower houses. These are the Australian Liberal Party and the National Party of Australia, which collectively constitute the Liberal National Coalition; and the Australian Labor Party (ALP). In the most recent 2019 national election, the LNC narrowly beat the ALP by 51.57% to 48.43% of the two-party preferred vote. According to the Australian Electoral Commission, the LNC won 77 seats in the Lower House, a bare majority; the ALP won 69; and one seat each went to the Australian Greens, Katter’s Australian Party and the Centre Alliance, and to two independents. While counting continues to determine the final composition of the Senate, the result of the half-Senate election (only 40 of 76 seats were vacant in the 2019 election) is that the LNC has 35 Senate seats, ALP 26, Greens 9, Pauline Hanson One Nation 2, Centre Alliance 2, and one seat each for the Australian Conservatives and the Jackie Lambie Network.

Australian Politics, Personal Values and Political Ideology The Australian Broadcasting Network employs a modified version of the Schwartz Personal Values scale to locate political parties on the economic left-right and social liberal-conservative dimensions (and encourages voters to take a survey to assess which party best fits their values) (Figure 1) and so this provides an approximate way of identifying the parties’ positions on the four key components of Sustainability Value. From Figure 1, we can see that the Greens are ranked as most economically and socially progressive, followed by the ALP (both in the top left-hand quadrant). In contrast, the LNC is ranked somewhat economically and socially conservative and is located in the bottom right-hand quadrant. A micro-party, the highly socially conservative, small-business and anti-immigration Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (ON), is located towards the social conservative pole.

While indicative of the very different value hierarchies in play in political

parties, Vote Compass data do not Figure 1: Australian Parties Location on Schwartz provide especially good information Values Circumplex regarding how parties might rank the four components of Sustainability Value. I thus employ a content analysis of the different party manifestos drawing on the Manifesto Project Database (https://manifesto- project.wzb.eu/), which archives and creates a searchable database of political party manifestos going back to the post-war era (1945).

The analysis was undertaken using the following parameters. The search timeline was from 1996 to 2018 and Source: www.votecompass.abc.net.au thus did not include the recent 2019 election. I commenced in 1996 since this provided information on 8 Australian federal elections given the country’s short, 3-year electoral cycle. Elections included were 1996, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016. Data was only collected only for the Liberal Party, National Party, the ALP and the Australian Greens. For the most part this was straightforward as it was possible to simple enter the name of a party string—e.g. Greens--in the database to identify how many of the terms being searched were used in that party’s manifestos. However, this did not fully work for the Liberal Party, as entering the string ‘Liberal’ not only searched manifestos produced by the Liberal Party of Australia but also those produced by the Liberal National Party of Queensland and the Country Liberal Party, based in the Northern Territory. However, since all three are closely aligned and manifestos produced by the Liberal Party of Australia dominate this part of the database, searching for hits under the ‘liberal’ string was nonetheless considered a good proxy for the Liberal Party of Australia. In contrast, searching the database using the string ‘national’ only returned hits from National Party manifestos, ‘labor’ only ALP manifestos and ‘green’ on manifestos from the Australian Greens.

Operationalising Economic Values To operationalise the constructs of ‘exchange value’, ‘use value’, ‘labour value’ and ‘function value’, I initially employed four terms each that are common proxies for them for each value. The terms are set out in Table 4. The logic of applying such search terms was that these are likely to be differentially used by different political parties in their manifestos to appeal to different audiences and that the manifestos in turn reflect party values and likely policy positions. Clearly, this rationale is more applicable to elite and mass parties than to catch-all parties, the latter simply aiming to craft a manifesto with broad appeal to capture enough votes to win. In Australia as elsewhere, however, it is hard to find pure examples of each party type and thus the rationale can be applied to the extent that political parties promote, however, weakly, some ideology.

Table 3: Proxies of Sustainability Value Used in the Manifesto Project Database Search Exchange Value Use Value Labour Value Function Value Proxy 1 Market National Worker Environment Proxy 2 Economy Community Labour Biodiversity Proxy 3 Trade Local Jobs Climate Change Proxy 4 Growth Indigenous Welfare Nature

Using the terms in Table 3 to search the Australian party manifestos of ‘conservative’ (Liberal Party, Liberal National Party and Country Liberal Party), ‘social democratic’ (ALP) and ‘ecological’ (Australian Greens) generated a total of 5,424 hits as set out in Table 4. However, some terms did not appear to discriminate between party positions. For example, all parties utilised the term ‘national’ extensively and it did not act as a discriminator of ‘use value’ as intended. To maintain a balance across each category of value, I thus removed one term from each category: ‘economy’, which was extensively used in the exchange value category, ‘national’ in the use value category, ‘jobs’ in the labour value category and ‘environment’ in the function value category. The following analysis is thus based on the data in Table 5.

Table 4: Distribution of Hits for Sustainability Value Components in the Manifesto Project Database (Number of hits) Liberal Party National Party Australian Australian of Australia* of Australia Labor Party Greens Exchange Value Market 56 81 116 19 Economy 329 79 224 58 Trade 46 59 52 36 Growth 192 83 140 15

Totals 623 302 532 128 Use Value National 116 189 361 222 Community 77 117 229 157 Local 81 172 150 47 Indigenous 7 12 134 24 Totals 281 490 874 450 Labour Value Worker 28 21 105 42 Labour 4 6 16 8 Jobs 225 127 388 39 Welfare 30 22 29 17 Totals 287 176 538 106 Function Value Environment 99 127 64 175 Biodiversity 0 2 2 22 Climate 12 12 42 63 Change Nature 5 3 2 7 Totals 116 144 110 267 4 Value Totals 1307 1112 2054 951 Grand Totals 5424

Table 5: Adjusted Distribution of Hits for Sustainability Value Components in the Manifesto Project Database (Number of hits) (Data for ‘economy’, ‘national’, ‘jobs’ and ‘environment’ removed) Liberal Party National Party Australian Australian of Australia* of Australia Labor Party Greens Exchange Value Market 56 81 116 19 Trade 46 59 52 36 Growth 192 83 140 15 Totals 294 223 308 70 Use Value Community 77 117 229 157 Local 81 172 150 47 Indigenous 7 12 134 24 Totals 165 301 513 228 Labour Value Worker 28 21 105 42 Labour 4 6 16 8 Welfare 30 22 29 17 Totals 62 49 150 67 Function Value Biodiversity 0 2 2 22 Climate 12 12 42 63 Change Nature 5 3 2 7 Totals 17 17 46 92 4 Value Totals 538 590 1017 457 Grand Totals 2602

Firstly, we can note that the analysis broadly supports the proposition that the four political parties have different value hierarchies across the four components of Sustainability Value. Thus, the combined total of the Australian Greens use of ‘exchange value’ terms like ‘market, ‘trade’ and ‘growth’ at 70 is a factor of three lower than the National Party’s which is the next lowest at 223. Conversely, the Australian Greens use of the ‘function value’ terms ‘biodiversity’, ‘climate change’ and ‘nature’ is at 94 a factor five times more than the Liberal Party and National Party use of 17 each. The ALP’s usage of labour value terms like ‘worker’,

‘labour’ and ‘welfare’ is at 150 more than double that of the Australian Greens and these terms are employed three times more frequently than the National Party. Calculating the value hierarchies of political parties off this raw data, one obtains the results set out in Table 6. While some parties have the expected ordering, there are several anomalies. The Australian Greens appear to preference use value over function value which seems odd; and the ALP preference use value and exchange value over labour value which does not ring true.

Table 6: Australian Political Parties Value Hierarchies (Initial Ranking, Raw Data) Political Party First Priority Second Priority Third Priority Fourth Priority Liberal Party Exchange Value Use Value Labour Value Function Value National Party Use Value Exchange Value Labour Value Function Value ALP Use Value Exchange Value Labour Value Function Value Australian Greens Use Value Function Value Exchange Value Labour Value

The source of these anomalies are not hard to find and are linked to the relative frequency with which the different terms are used by all political parties in their manifestos. Terms like , ‘local’ ‘growth’ and ‘worker’ are used relatively more frequently by all parties than terms like ‘biodiversity’, ‘labour’ and ‘trade’. To get a better sense of each party’s value hierarchy relative to the frequency with which terms appear, it is therefore necessary to normalise within the different value categories. To do this, the total number of hits in each value category was normalised to 100 and the numerator employed normalise the sum of each parties’ scores on that value category. Table 7 reports the normalised data and gives results more closely aligned with ideological expectations and with those of Vote Compass.

Table 7: Distribution of Hits for Sustainability Value Components in the Manifesto Project Database (Normalised number of hits) Liberal National ALP Australian Totals Party Party Greens Exchange Value Totals 294 223 308 70 895 x 0.112 Normalised 33 25 34 8 100

Use Value Totals 165 301 513 228 1207 x 0.083 Normalised 14 25 42 19 100

Labour Value Totals 62 49 150 67 328 x 0.305 Normalised 19 15 46 20 100

Function Value Totals 17 17 46 92 172 x 0.581 Normalised 10 10 27 53 100

The value hierarchies of the normalised data are compared to those of the raw data in Table 8. Several significant and understandable shifts in value hierarchies are evident. Firstly, although

the Liberal Party’s top value remains exchange value, labour value has replaced use value as its second priority. Function value remains fourth. With regard to the national party, use and exchange value remain their priority with labour value and function value remaining in third and fourth place respectively. For the ALP, the normalised data now has it prioritising labour value over use value with exchange value and function value in third and fourth places respectively. Finally, the Australian Greens are now seen to prioritise function value over labour value with use value and exchange value in third and fourth place respectively. These normalised value orderings not only are closely linked to what would be expected ideologically in terms of value that leads the respective parties’ hierarchies but it also explains the distance between parties as represented in Vote Compass.

Table 7: Australian Political Parties Value Hierarchies: Raw and Normalised Data First Priority Second Priority Third Priority Fourth Priority Liberal Party (Initial Ranking) Exchange Value Use Value Labour Value Function Value Liberal (Adjusted Ranking) Exchange Value Labour Value Use Value Function Value

National Party (Initial Ranking) Use Value Exchange Value Labour Value Function Value National Party (Adjusted Ranking) Use Value Exchange Value Labour Value Function Value

ALP (Initial Ranking) Use Value Exchange Value Labour Value Function Value ALP (Adjusted Ranking) Labour Value Use Value Exchange Value Function Value

Greens (Initial Ranking) Use Value Function Value Exchange Value Labour Value Greens (Adjusted Ranking) Function Value Labour Value Use Value Exchange Value

I have demonstrated in this section that (a) exchange, use, labour and function value are operationally distinct concepts that are empirically associated with related terms; and (b) that political parties in Australia have different value hierarchies and rank order the four value components of Sustainability Value differently. The LNC put exchange value first, the Nationals use value and the ALP labour value. All three parties rank function value last in their hierarchies. In contrast, the Greens rank function value first and exchange value last. These differences in value priorities are a major source of the observed conflict between Liberals, Nationals, the ALP and the Greens in Australia and beyond. They also appear to play a role in explaining the conflict between public and private forestry governance.

The Intersection of Public and Private Governance in Forestry in Australia Historical Background In the 1990s when forest certification emerged as an international instrument for improved forest management, Australia was in the throws of a ‘forest war’ that pitted communities

against each other over land clearance, old-growth logging and biodiversity protection. In Tasmania, for example, a long-standing conflict between the forest industry and environmentalists over the impact of development projects and logging had resulted in forest blockades, legal challenges, and political manoeuvres leading the newly elected ALP Government under the leadership of Bob Hawke to pass legislation in 1983 to declare a substantial proportion of the state a UNESCO World Heritage site. This event was subsequently followed by a bitter State debate over the establishment of a pulp mill at Wesley Vale, which was ultimately cancelled in part due to environmental movement pressure.

Outraged at these developments, the Tasmanian forest industry sought to prevent further ‘lock ups’ of forest land and build a viable woodchip export industry to take advantage of high demand in Japan. By the early 1990s, a new front in the forest wars had opened up, with environmentalists opposing the chipping of native forests for Japanese markets even as the forest industry became increasingly dependent on it for economic viability. With logging in much of Australia’s old-growth forests only economic if all the wood can be harvested, the bargain was that high quality ‘peeler’ logs would be processed by local sawmills and poor quality ‘pulp’ logs would be chipped and sent to Japan. When the Liberal National Coalition was elected to power in 1996 under Prime Minister John Howard, the industry finally secured the forest deal it wanted. Regional forest agreements were negotiated across several Australian states to legally protected a forest estate for logging giving industry the incentive to invest.

It was in this general context that forest certification emerged in Australia and both industry and environmentalists were initially sceptical regarding its feasibility and worth. Given that Japanese importers of Australian wood chips and pulp had little interest in certified products, Australian exporters considered certification unnecessary and thus only kept a watching brief on developments in North America and Europe. Environmental NGOs, collaborating within Australia’s Native Forest Network, were also unpersuaded. Despite one of their members, Tim Cadman, attending early North American discussion on forest certification, there was concern that forest certification was a distraction that could undermine a ‘no native logging’ environmental initiative and the broader objective of shift the Australian forest industry to a plantations-only approach. With neither the industry nor environmentalists promoting it, Australia became a laggard with regard to forest certification compared to actions taken in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Emerging Interest in Forest Certification The incentives for industry to embrace forest certification shifted abruptly in the late 1990s. The 1997-98 Asian Currency Crisis led to a significant economic downturn in the Asian region with significantly effects on the demand for Australian woodchips. With demand declining in Asia, exporters sought markets in the US and Europe discovering that some kind of eco-label would be required to be competitive. Noting that Canadians had the Canadian Standards Association standard, Americans the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and Europeans working towards an umbrella scheme, in 1999 the peak forestry body in Australia, the National Association of Forest Industries (NAFI) took a decision to develop its own national forestry standard. It worked closely with the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) to develop a standard that would be compatible with the ones emerging in North America and Europe. The Australian Forestry Standard (AFS) was provisionally approved by Standards Australia in 2003 and received final approval in 2007. It joined the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification in 2002 and had its provisional standard endorsed in 2004 and re-endorsed in 2009 and 2015.

Efforts to establish the Forest Stewardship Council scheme commenced in 2001, with Tim Cadman from the Native Forest Network, also acting as Australia’s FSC contact person. However, although a relatively large-scale operation, Hancock Victoria Plantations, received FSC certification in 2004 under an interim standard, it remained controversial and many in the environmental movement and beyond continued to oppose FSC certification in general and especially for native forests which, as per the policy decisions taken in the 1990s, were viewed as unavailable for any logging. FSC was finally formally launched in 2006 with an office in Melbourne, Victoria; it struggled to find funds to support an Australian standards development consultation and it was only with the election of the 2010 Gillard ALP government that funds were finally made available from government to support such an endeavour, linked to the efforts to resolve Tasmania’s ongoing forest conflict. However, despite the process commencing in 2013, it took over 7 years to negotiate and it was only in 2018 that FSC Australia was finally able to announce it had an approved, FSC-international, forestry standard which is now being rolled out across the country.

In summary, as in other jurisdictions, forestry in Australia has proven to be a highly contentious and highly politicised sector that has pitted groups with very different values against each other in a struggle over how much of what type of forests should be protected, logged and cleared

for other purposes, notably agriculture. This conflict carried over into a ‘certification war’ between a coalition composed of the native forestry industry and Commonwealth and state Liberal, Labour and National governments who backed the PEFC-compatible AFS scheme; and the Greens, which backed the FSC scheme. The value hierarchies of the different parties and how they interacted with the two schemes was clearly on display in the debates that took place in the Commonwealth Parliament from 2000 to 2018 as described below.

Australian Parliamentary Debates and the Certification Wars The following analysis is based on a search of the Hansard records for the Australian Commonwealth House of Representatives and Senate debates and inquiries from 2000 to 2018 under the term ‘forest certification’. Comments on forest certification appeared in the following years: 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2018. Many of the comments were made by the Minister or Shadow Minister responsible for forestry and were biased towards support for the PEFC and against the FSC. In an early intervention in 2000, for example, Minister Wilson Tuckey (Liberal Party) stated:

Certification is one of many tools for promoting sustainable forest management… By way of demonstrating a partnership approach to achieving sustainable forest management, rather than a more interventionist approach, the Federal Government is jointly sponsoring the development of the Australian Forestry Standard in partnership with industry and State and Territory Governments. The Australian Forestry Standard will set a domestic and international benchmark for the achievement of sustainable forest management. It will also be the basis by which independent third parties may audit the performance of Australian forest growers and managers, including for the purpose of certification (Tuckey 2000).

Tuckey’s comment highlighted the deep collaboration between the Australian forest industry and the LNC government with regard to forest certification. While the industry was driving the establishment of the AFS, it was receiving significant support from the Australian Government in the form of office space, seconded personnel, consulting reports and rhetorical support.

The Liberal National Coalition government under John Howard, as with NAFI and the wider old-growth forest industry, was concerned to ensure that AFS was perceived as the equivalent of FSC and supported studies to ‘prove’ this was the case. In a 2003 speech by Richard Colbeck, a Tasmanian Liberal Senator who would later become the Minister for Forests, the following claims were made:

To assess compatibility with overseas systems, Australia's Forest and Wood Products Research and Development Corporation commissioned an independent study of the AFS. The comparative study by Finnish company Indufor Oy, who are experts in sustainability certification, examined how the standard setting and technical criteria of the AFS compared to those of the Pan European Forest Certification covering most of Europe and of the FSC network which is prominent in Scandinavia. The study concluded that the AFS is compatible with both the major groups of overseas sustainability standards and, importantly, the study confirmed that the AFS was compatible with the FSC on environmental performance standards. The compatibility of the AFS with the FSC environmental impact principle is at a high level regarding the conduct of environmental impact statements, protection of species and their habitats, maintenance of ecological functions and values of forests, and conversion of natural forest cover to plantations (Colbeck 2003).

From Tuckey and Colbeck’s speeches, it is evident that Australian Liberal and National parties strongly endorsed the AFS/PEFC scheme and sought to minimise the differences between it and the FSC’s. This took the discursive form of highlighting similarities in the two schemes technical approaches—both had ‘multistakeholder’ committees to negotiate the standard, both standards set out a hierarchy of ‘principles and criteria’ or ‘criteria and requirements’, both were third-party certified, and so forth. Such claims ignored the substantive differences between the two standards. AFS’ ‘business as usual’ approach enabled almost all forest operators to be immediately certified with few significant changes to practices. In contrast, the much more demanding ‘eco-social’ approach taken by the FSC (Gale & Cadman 2015) set a much higher bar for Sustainable Forest Management that included significant provisions for the protection of old-growth forests and local and Indigenous engagement.

Other discursive strategies were also in operation in Parliamentary debates on forest certification in the 2000s in Australia. Launching a full-scale attack on the FSC, the ALP Shadow Minister for Forestry argued that it was a vehicle for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to usurp the role of government and run a protection racket.

Instead they [environmentalists] favour accreditation under the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, an organisation, interestingly, created by the WWF, with the clear intention of sidelining elected governments when it comes to forest policy. Behind its foray into the forest certification process, the WWF has a history of establishing buyer groups that effectively boycott timber products that are not FSC certified. Consequently, producers and suppliers are pressured to obtain FSC certification to maintain their businesses and their market access. The FSC’s business interests are effectively protected by the environmental NGOs, who have mounted a concerted attack over recent years on other certification schemes. The AFS is just one of these schemes (Ferguson 2004).

The claim that FSC ‘usurps’ the legitimate right of governments to regulate forestry domestically was widely made by both Liberal, National and ALP politicians in the 2000s. Another ALP Member of Parliament, Senator Kerry O’Brien, who was Shadow Minister for Transportation, noted in the same debate:

Make no mistake: these are not environmental campaigns; they are political and they are commercial. Increasingly, environmental NGOs around the world, with the complicity of governments, are embedding themselves in policy and regulatory frameworks in which they have commercial interests. They do so with no mandate from the people and with no accountability. The forest industry provides a classic example. Instead of endorsing the AFS—developed in accordance with the usual rigorous standards processes used in Australia and New Zealand to govern all kinds of industries and products—green groups have been lobbying to discredit the standard internationally. Instead, they favour accreditation under the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, an organisation created by the World Wide Fund for Nature with the clear intention of sidelining elected governments when it comes to forest policy. Beyond its foray into the forest certification business, the WWF has a history of establishing buyer groups that effectively boycott timber products that are not FSC certified. Consequently, producers and suppliers are pressured to obtain FSC certification to maintain market access. The FSC’s business interests are effectively protected by environmental NGOs, who have mounted a concerted attack over recent years on other certification schemes. The AFS is just one of those. It is instructive to take a look at the membership and governance of the FSC if there is any doubt about this. In Australia, there are just 10 members, including five environmental NGOs—Friends of the Earth, the Wilderness Society, Friends of Gippsland Bush, the Western Australian Forest Alliance and WWF Australia.

Such attacks on the FSC were not confined to the ALP side of the House and Senate. The former leader of the National Party, Ron Boswell, made his views evident in a speech to the Senate in 2012.

In the timber industry, we have seen the Forest Stewardship Council—a body supported by several green NGOs, including the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF—certifying products. We have seen it in the seafood industry through a body known as the Marine Stewardship Council, founded by the WWF, and we are also seeing the beginnings of a similar move in the beef industry through what is called the Roundtable for Sustainable Beef Australia, or RSBA, where again WWF is prominent. The ultimate intent of these moves by WWF and other environmental activists involved in certification is to ensure that only goods certified under their schemes are sold through Australian retail outlets such as supermarkets, furniture retailers et cetera. Of course, to have their products certified in the first place, and then have that certification renewed on a regular basis so those products can continue to be sold to the Australian public, costs producers a substantial amount of money. This is a very serious issue for Australian primary producers and Australian consumers. I am calling on the Treasurer to refer these schemes to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the ACCC, for investigation on the basis they could represent a secondary boycott. I am also calling on the Treasurer

to take action to amend the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 to remove any doubt that the green NGOs who are threatening to instigate boycotts of Australian primary products—especially Tasmanian forest products following the collapse of talks between industry and the green NGOs—can be referred to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission under sections 45D and 45E, relating to secondary boycotts.

These extracts from parliamentary debates provide insights into the positions adopted in the Liberal, National and Australian Labor Party with regard to forest certification and labelling in Australia in the first decade of the 21st century. Reflecting significant differences in party values, these speeches highlighted the strong support offered to AFS and the strident opposition given to the FSC. The overall discursive strategies adopted by all three parties were as follows:

• Support AFS by claiming the scheme was equivalent to FSC’s and was more legitimate because it had certified a larger area, was backed by the Australian forest industry, and was a member of the PEFC; and • Critique the FSC scheme because it was backed by NGOs, sought to usurp the authority of the state to set forest standards, and was potentially trade restrictive.

Conclusion In this paper, I outlined an alternative conception of economic value as Sustainability Value composed of four exchange, use, labour and function value elements. I argued that such an approach helps explain conflict, cooperation and coexistence between public and private governance schemes. Public governance in the West today takes the form of winner-take-all competitive party politics resulting in individual political parties forming to tap into natural differences in the polity in terms of personal values. Liberal parties exploit ‘openness to change values’, nationalist parties’ conservation values’, and socialist and Green parties ‘universalism’ and ‘benevolence’ values. When such a political party wins power, it aims to have its political ideology represented in policy, forestalling the deliberation required to realise Sustainability Value. Instead, policy is oriented towards realising exchange value, or labour value or national use value.

Such political parties then run in to conflict with private governance schemes that do not share their value’s hierarchy. This is what occurred in the 2000s in Australia. The reason why AFS/PEFC was strongly supported by Liberal, National and Labor parties was because its value hierarchy was highly compatible with the value hierarchies of these dominant parties— the AFS sought to protect forest investment, forest jobs and national use values. Conversely,

27 the reason why both the LNC and ALP bitterly attacked the FSC scheme was because its value hierarchy was balanced across the four-value components of Sustainability Value. Notably, the FSC gave due weight to function value which the three other major parties all discount and place last in their value’s hierarchies.

The analysis set out here can be extended to many other private governance schemes. Organic agriculture, fair trade and free range certification schemes have all been challenged by liberal, socialist and nationalist governments and for similar reasons: they are perceived as challenging their dominant value hierarchies—either by restricting trade, destroying jobs or limiting national development. Conversely, schemes with minimal effects, such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, gain significant support from liberal, socialist and nationalist governments precisely because they endorse their fundamental values. It is hard to see the conflict between public and private governance ending any time soon—it appears to require a new political system that no longer puts in place a party-political government that is predisposed to validate only one or two of Sustainability Value’s four value components.

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