Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together: Can State Plans Deliver Environmental Sustainability?

Abstract

Sustainability has always been a contested term, environmental sustainability in particular. It presents challenges and opportunities for policy making at all levels. This paper suggests that state plans have a key role to play in the pursuit of sustainability. It argues that, in theory, sustainability requires well integrated, interactive, informed and informing, as well as institutionalised policy processes. It reviews state plans in Tasmania and Victoria to analyse their capacity for delivering sustainability. Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together are very different plans, so very different conclusions are drawn here, however we find that both of them lack the explicit political and policy commitment to sustainability that is required to turn rhetoric into state planning practice.