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International Conference on Public Policy, Montreal, Quebec, Canada 26-28 June 2019 This is an early draft so please do not quote without permission.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] 1 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.