
Fred GaleUniversity of Tasmania · School of Social Sciences
Fred Gale
BA, MA, PhD
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (100)
Hydrogen produced from renewable energy is being promoted to decarbonise global energy systems. To support this energy transition, standards, certification, and labelling schemes (SCLs) aim to differentiate hydrogen products based on their system-wide carbon emissions and method of production characteristics. However, being certified as low-carbon,...
Food security is a concept with evolving definitions and meanings, shaped by contested knowledge and changing contexts. The way in which food security is understood by governments impacts how it is addressed in public policy. This research investigates the evolution of discourses and practices in Tasmanian food and nutrition policies from 1994 to 2...
As part of reducing carbon emissions, governments across the world are working on measures to transition sectors of the economy away from fossil fuels. The socio-technical regimes being constructed around the energy transition can encourage energy centralisation and constrain actor engagement without proper policy and planning. The energy transitio...
As the world grapples with the issue of climate change, and efforts to decarbonize economies result in a shift from extractive “brown” industries to sustainable “green” ones, there is an increasing recognition of the need for this transition to be a just and equitable one. This systematic review of the Just Transitions literature examines the centr...
Many cities around the world have adopted the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals framework (SDGs) to assist the operationalization of a triple-bottom line approach to sustainable development (SD). However, despite an expressed commitment to the SDGs, the narratives underpinning city branding, city policy, urban planning and urban developm...
Objective
The emerging concept of ‘food justice’ has been described as a movement and a set of principles that align with the goals of social justice, which demands recognition of human rights, equal opportunity, fair treatment, and is participatory and community specific. Considering its widespread use and variable definitions, this study establis...
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated public health restrictions temporarily disrupted food supply chains around the world and changed the way people shopped for food, highlighting issues with food systems resilience and sustainability. The aim of this study was to explore consumer-driven strategies towards a more resilient and sustainabl...
Universities have a responsibility to engage their diverse communities in meaningful conversations and actions in support of sustainable development. However, such engagement often occurs in siloed initiatives that target discrete groups: students, academics, or professional staff. Rarely do initiatives adopt a whole-of-university approach to bring...
Purpose
This study aims to explore whether adopting a sustainability narrative in city branding and urban development strategies results in more inclusive governance arrangements (process) and a more pluralistic approach to generating sustainability value (outcome), in line with the triple bottom line approach advocated by the United Nations’ Susta...
As a relatively new form of non-state governance, the fair trade movement presents an opportunity to promote sustainable production and consumption and hence social change. Global market demands and consumer engagement denote changes in social practices that have led governments to share decision-making processes with private sector and non-governm...
While cities are increasingly engaging in planning and branding for sustainability, to date, there has been insufficient attention or scrutiny applied to what these new ends and means are and might need to look like. In particular, little attention has been devoted to reflecting on how sustainability is calling into question our understanding of on...
The purpose of this chapter is to subject the concept of ‘value’ in the city branding literature to a forensic analysis to determine the degree to which urban branding premises and practices can indeed contribute to creating the ‘sustainable city’ (Rees, 1997). The next section introduces and reflects on some of the key concepts in value theory in...
Certification schemes respond to increasing environmental and social concerns about sustainability by encouraging consumer demand for ‘sustainable’ products. Such schemes have been a focus of much media coverage and the seafood sector is no exception with many seafood sustainability issues, including those related to both fisheries and aquaculture...
Sustainability certification schemes such as FAIRTRADE, FLO, WFTO and FT-USA have gained increasing markets. The significant growth of the fair trade (FT) movement in the last decades draws attention to ethical consumption. FT’s aim at improving the livelihoods of producers in developing countries and promotion of social change is considered a mode...
Much of the awareness in society towards sustainable development objectives has been fostered by United Nations (UN) programmes, non-governmental organisations and social movements they have inspired. Within the stream of social change occurred after the second world war, fair trade initiative innovated as a social movement by offering an internati...
Grande parte da conscientização da sociedade em relação aos objetivos de desenvolvimento sustentável foi fomentada pelos programas das Nações Unidas (ONU), organizações não-governamentais e movimentos sociais que eles inspiraram. Dentro do fluxo de mudanças sociais ocorridas após a Segunda Guerra Mundial, a iniciativa de comércio justo inovou como...
Research in both public administration and place development has identified a need to develop more participatory approaches to governing cities and regions. Scholars have identified place branding as one of several potential policy instruments to enable more participatory place development. Recently, academics working in diverse disciplines, includ...
Sustainability, conceptualised as the integration of economic, social and environmental values, is the 21 st century imperative that demands that governments, business and civil society actors improve their existing performance, yet improvement has been highly fragmented and unacceptably slow. One explanation for this is the lack of diversity on th...
Purpose
Place branding research has recently focused on developing more inclusive models to better capture the co-creation of place identities. This paper aims to investigate stakeholder communication interactions in place branding processes to inform alternative, participatory, network governance models of stakeholder engagement.
Design/methodolo...
Voluntary organic standard-setting organisations (SSOs) depend upon public trust in the truth claims implied by their labels: that the product in question has been produced using organic methods. They create and maintain this trust through assurance frameworks based on third-party verification of compliance with organic standards. It is therefore p...
This presentation is an extended version of a poster presented at the FTIS 2018 that took place in the UK; and is a result of an ongoing research on sustainability, fair trade, ethical consumerism and food systems. The abstract is available at the Proceedings of the World Symposium on Sustainability Building Resilience in a Dynamic Global Economy (...
Background: The 2017 Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) Strategy is based on the underlying assumption that digital
technology in health care environments is ubiquitous. The ADHA Strategy views health professionals, especially nurses, as
grappling with the complexity of installing and using digital technologies to facilitate personalized and s...
Migration management in the South Asia region is an increasingly important issue because of its increasing share in migration stock and remittances inflow. Since the 1970s, the majority of migrants in this region prefer to go to the Gulf countries to deploy the largest workers. Similarly, South Asian countries have received an increasing amount of...
en To promote environmentally sustainable corporate behavior, a complex system of global private governance operates where civil society groups play dominant roles. We argue that the concept of “metagovernance” developed in the public administration literature helps scholars and practitioners make sense of the constellation of actors, structures, a...
BACKGROUND
The 2017 Australian Digital Health Agency National Digital Health Strategy (ADHA Strategy) is based on the underlying assumption that digital technology in healthcare environments is ubiquitous. The ADHA Strategy views health professionals, especially nurses, as grappling with the complexity of installing and using digital technologies t...
Background
Access to, and use of, mobile or portable devices for learning at point of care within Australian healthcare environments is poorly governed. An absence of clear direction at systems, organisation and individual levels has created a mobile learning paradox, whereby although nurses understand the benefits of seeking and retrieving discipl...
Innovatively rethinking the discipline of political economy, Fred P. Gale builds on a range of contemporary examples to develop a pluralistic conception of sustainability value that underpins sustainable development. He identifies why current approaches are having no meaningful impact and unifies diverse perspectives into one integrative approach....
The mainstreaming of ethical consumption over the past two decades has attuned citizen-consumers to their power to shape food production practices through their consumption choices. To navigate the complexity inherent in contemporary food supply chains, ethical consumers often turn to certification and labelling schemes to identify which products t...
During the last five years, research about mobile learning conducted with nurses, nurse supervisors and undergraduate students has provided insight into the complexity of this emerging issue, which has the potential to positively impact the workflow of nursing care and improve patient outcomes. Survey and focus group studies including confirmation...
In the past 20 years, a proliferation of governance instruments has been developed by both state and non-state actors. Today, many industrial sectors are governed by a variety of overlapping instruments that are usually analysed separately rather than as a collective. In this paper, we make the case for analysing such codes as a collective, given t...
Background
The rapid growth in the use of mobile technology in Australia has outpaced its governance, especially in healthcare settings. Whilst some Australian professional bodies and organisations have developed standards and guidelines to direct appropriate use of social media and mobile technology, clear governance arrangements regarding when, w...
In the 1990s, civil society organizations partnered with business to “green” global supply chains by setting up formal sustainability standard-setting organizations (SSOs) in secwtors including organic food, fair trade, forestry, and fisheries. Although SSOs have withstood the long-standing allegations that they are unnecessary, costly, nondemocrat...
Higher education institutions have an unavoidable responsibility to address the looming economic, environmental and social crises imperilling humans and ecosystems by placing ‘education for sustainability’ at the heart of their concerns. Yet, for over three decades, the practice of ‘higher education for sustainability’ (HEfS) has encountered signif...
Private initiatives in the fields of taxation and investment are emerging to ensure corporations pay their fair share in taxes and that investments are socially and ecological sustainable. New global standards organisations (GSOs) have formed to govern corporate behaviour with examples including Fair Tax Mark, UN Global Compact, the Equator Princip...
Conflict over how forests should be managed has been a perennial feature of Australian environmental policy. In the early 2000s, these conflicts spilled over into a ‘certification war’ between two international forest certification standards – the Australian Forestry Standard, championed by industry and government, and the Forest Stewardship Counci...
This article investigates the origin of international norms, arguing that one pathway is via the strategic action of sector-specific policy networks. Evidence is adduced from an examination of the contested norm of sustainable forest management (SFM). It is argued that a Canadian forestry policy network, under pressure inter- nally and externally t...
Negotiating global environmental agreements involves aggregating and mediating divergent interests. In multiparty electoral systems, the process begins at the subnational level where interests aggregated by business associations, trade unions and civil society organizations are represented to political parties and governments in an effort to secure...
Global negotiations to create international policy regimes to govern specific issue areas are conventionally conducted at intergovernmental forums. In the post-war period, and especially from the 1980s onwards, a wide range of such negotiations has occurred in economic, social and environmental policy arenas. Analysts have studied several success s...
This symposium, ‘Conceptualizing New Governance Arrangements', takes up the challenge of refining governance theory to better integrate work in several disciplines, most notably politics, public administration and law. To this end, we argue for a theoretical framework that profiles three key dimensions of governance: institutional, political and re...
This article examines the institutional, political and regulatory dimensions of environmental assessment (EA) processes. While EA is most often conceptualized as a regulatory instrument, this article contends that viewing EA in this narrow fashion obscures the broader implications and significance of EA as a distinct form of governance. When concei...
Environmental politics is not always the outcome of the complex interplay of interests and institutions mediated by ideas. Sometimes naked self-interest prevails and proponents manipulate environmental institutions to achieve their goals. The way in which economic interests can trump environmental ideas and institutions is illustrated by the case o...
Commodities like coffee, tea, sugar, cocoa, timber and fish are key components of world trade. They unite primary and intermediary producers with retailers, wholesalers and consumers in a global network of production and consumption. Yet much of this global commodity trade is environmentally and socially unsustainable, resulting in pollution, defor...
On 14 March 2007, Gunns Ltd withdrew its Tamar Valley pulp mill proposal from the environmental assessment being conducted by Tasmania’s planning authority. The proposal subsequently underwent three other assessments: by consultants hired under the provisions of the State’s specially legislated Pulp Mill Assessment Act 2007; by the Department of En...
Of the three cases of forest and fisheries certification examined in this study, the UK’s has been the most successful. Not only are all public forest lands in the UK now certified, but so too is a significant portion of private forest land. Moreover, this certification success has been achieved via a compromise between environmental, economic and...
The preceding chapters have examined how the development and institutionalisation of the FSC and the MSC have contributed to global commodity governance. While trade in commodities, including forest and fisheries products, is longstanding, late twentieth-century globalisation and concomitant development of natural resources have provided significan...
Commodities play a vital role in world trade. Every day, huge quantities of oil, iron, gold, silver, tin, copper, coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, rice, wheat, corn, fish, cotton, wool and timber and other products are transported around the world. The trade in commodities links a vast number of producers and consumers together via lengthy and complicate...
A major challenge confronting the global community is the restructuring of production and consumption relations to meet the requirements of environmental and social sustainability. Two dimensions to this challenge stand out. The first is to reduce the overall scale of production measured in terms of throughput of energy and materials, while simulta...
The ‘resourcist’ and ‘developmentalist’ orientation of Australia’s economy (Walker 1999) creates opportunities for producers to engage in regulatory capture via clientelistic and triadic policy networks. In the forest arena, triadic policy networks exist and are especially effective at the state level. While fisheries policy networks are generally...
Canadian forest and fisheries policy networks were early adopters of certification. At both the federal and provincial levels, certification presented policy networks with significant strategic threats and opportunities. With respect to forest certification, the FSC was perceived as a direct threat to network interests which immediately responded b...
Certification and labelling emerged on the international policy agenda in the late 1980s in a context of increased public concern over food scares, ‘unfair’ trade, deforestation, child and sweatshop labour and other ecologically and socially damaging practices. In 1988, following many years by Oxfam and other Alternative Trading Organisation, the f...
In Chapter 2, we argued that to understand state responses to FSC and MSC certification schemes it was necessary to disaggregate the state to the sectoral level and investigate the structure, operation and evolution of policy networks. In studying such policy networks, we noted the need to be mindful of how they were shaped by the ecology of the re...
In Chapter 2 we argued that the structure and operation of policy networks are key to explaining states’ responses to certification schemes. Such networks emerge and transform themselves over time as a consequence of interactions between a country’s ecology, constitution, commodity-chain structures and resource-management discourses. These natural,...
In November 2004, the Tasmanian government requested the state's planning body, the Resource Planning and Development Commission (RPDC), to undertake an evaluation of a proposal to establish a pulp mill at Long Reach near Bell Bay on Tasmania's Tamar Estuary. In early 2007, Gunns Limited, the project's proponent, pulled out of the RPDC process and...
Setting the Standard chronicles the emergence and implications of an ambitious experiment in civil-society-led global governance: the Forest Stewardship Council. The FSC was born in 1993 as a grassroots initiative to promote 'environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable manage of the world's forests' through an internat...
Forest certification emerged in the early 1990s as a market-driven way to limit the destruction wrought on tropical forests, giving consumers, retailers, and manufacturers the opportunity to purchase products derived from environmentally and socially responsible forest operations. Although certification caught on in the developed world, it has stru...
Business reviews of the forest industry in British Colombia, Canada, typically portray an unequivocally positive picture of its financial and economic health. In doing so, they fail to consider the following six categories of social impacts and costs: (1) direct and indirect subsidies; (2) government support through investment; (3) community depend...
Introduction Rapid expansion of global timber markets in developing and transitioning countries has often caused significant damage to their forests and the people who depend on them. These problems have been exacerbated by limited local regulatory capacity and pressing needs for Western currency. The most important institutional response to date h...
Public policy has been infiltrated by private regimes of regulation in the past decade. Such private regimes include industry codes of conduct and voluntary certification and labelling schemes. One such scheme is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC‐AC), an international, civil‐society‐based organization headquartered in Bonn, Germany, which promote...
Community forestry has become a much-discussed alternative to more conventional private and public approaches to forest management in recent years. While many countries are experimenting with community forestry, there is little consensus on what the term actually embraces. Theories and practices that are labelled “community forestry” cover a wide r...
Comforting terms such as "sustainable development" and "green production" frame environmental debate by stressing technology (not green enough), economic growth (not enough in the right places), and population (too large). Concern about consumption emerges, if at all, in benign ways; as calls for green purchasing or more recycling, or for small cha...
The author contrasts the economic principle of specialization found in trade theory with the ecological principle of diversification that underlies the ecosystem approach to natural resource use. He argues that current ecosystem decline is a consequence of the over-extension of the principle of specialization from the factory setting to nature. Whe...
By embracing a global politics perspective, new questions can be asked about the manner in which global ctors representing states, markets and global civil society mutually construct the field of global politics and influence and shape events. This paper addresses itself to one such question and examines the strategies adopted by global civil socie...
The authors examine the commodity‐oriented nature of the British Columbia (BC) forest industry in the context of domestic policy changes and globalization. An analysis of primary data on the volume and value of wood products highlights the degree to which BC firms depend on the export of four products (softwood lumber, pulp, newsprint, and paper) f...
The author reviews the theoretical history of the international regime concept and its deployment within neorealist, neoliberal and institutionalist IR conceptual frameworks. He argues that the five criticisms or 'dragons' levelled by Susan Strange at the concept in her 1982 article 'Cave! Hic dragones' simultaneously underestimated the concept's t...
The world's tropical rainforests are disappearing rapidly and governments appear powerless to stop it. Employing an innovative, critical approach to international regime theory, the book examines the structure and operation of the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO). An outcome of an international commodity agreement signed in 1983, t...
In the previous two chapters, I described and analysed the four global coalitions that represented the interests of producing-and consumingcountry governments, the tropical timber industry and the environmental movement at the ITTC. These coalitions debated and negotiated, formally and informally, the normative structure, procedures and compliance...
In spite of close to twenty years of theoretical elaboration and empirical research, the international regime concept still lacks a critical edge. The concept, introduced into the international relations literature in the 1975 Special Edition of International Organization, was initially defined as a set of mutual expectations, rules and regulations...
In the previous chapter, we saw how the debates over guidelines for sustainable forest management were aimed at modifying, albeit marginally, the rules of the post-war regime governing the tropical timber trade. Similar debates took place at the ITTC between 1985 and 1994 over the adequacy of the TTTR’s compliance mechanisms. In addition to existin...
The debates and negotiations outlined in the previous two chapters over the TTTR’s normative structure and compliance mechanisms were conducted largely in the abstract. ITTO’s sustainable forest management guidelines and the various proposals for certification and labeling schemes were developed on paper, not implemented in practice. Consequently,...
The previous chapter concluded with the observation that a substantial percentage of tropical deforestation and rainforest degradation was due to the tropical timber trade. The precise contribution varies from region to region and from country to country, reflecting differences in forest type, transportation infrastructure, proximity to markets, an...
The ITTA-1983 created a forum for struggle over the rights and responsibilities, procedures, and compliance mechanisms of the tropical timber trade regime. All components of the tropical timber trade regime were continuously contested at biannual meetings of the ITTO. To understand why so little change occurred in the normative, procedural and comp...
The critical approach to regime analysis developed in the previous chapter directs us to examine specific issue areas when analysing the process of regime formation. This requirement necessitates in turn a solid grounding in the issue area being investigated. The purpose of this chapter is to review the tropical forestry literature and to set out t...
The formal contours of the Tropical Timber Trade Regime (TTTR) can be traced back to the provisions of the International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1983 (ITTA-1983). Prior to that date, the tropical timber trade was governed exclusively by the normative structure, procedures and compliance mechanisms of the international trade regime (ITR). The 198...
The underlying goal of this study is to answer one of the most pressing ecological questions of the late twentieth century: why is tropical deforestation and rainforest degradation continuing unabated despite the expressed intentions and evident efforts of governments working through several international forums (ITTO, TFAP, FAO and UNCED), to halt...
The state coalitions that debate the rights and rules, procedures and compliance mechanisms of regimes do not carry out these activities in a political economic vacuum, devoid of economic and civil society pressures. In the present case, the structure of the tropical timber industry provided the political economic conditions for the emergence of fo...
In the words of Robert Cox,
critical theory stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that order came about. Critical theory, unlike problem- solving theory, does not take institutions and social powerrelations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be i...
‘Crisis’ is an overworked term in the English language. It is used to describe everything from the smallest of domestic problems (the babysitter cancels at the last minute) to the largest, most dramatic of global events (Bosnia). The term implies that the events identified as crises require urgent and careful attention demonstrating an individual’s...
List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Acronyms Used The Tropical Rainforest Crisis International Regimes: A Conceptual History A Neo-Gramscian Approach to International Regimes Tropical Deforestation and Rainforest Degradation The Tropical Timber Trade The International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1983 State Coalitions Contesting t...
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an international, civil society-based organisation headquartered in Oaxaca, Mexico, that promotes certification of forest management practices. To ensure well-managed forests, forest managers seeking FSC certification must adopt practices that conform to its ten principles and 56 associated criteria (P&Cs). F...