Local Governance for Social Sustainability: equity as a strategic response to neoliberal constraints in food security initiatives

ABSTRACT

Scholarly literature recognises the importance of social sustainability as part of the wider sustainability agenda. A wide array of concepts such as equity, social justice, democratic government, social inclusion, social capital and quality of life are thought to constitute social sustainability. Local governments are charged with delivering social programs and services to their constituency, but market logics and performance-based institutional cultures, along with limited authority and funding, constrain their capacity to respond to new initiatives. We analyse two case studies in Victoria, Australia, to explore how elements of social sustainability are articulated and operationalised within local government. Each case study involved State-level and local government partnerships in health-promotion initiatives to improve food security. Analysis was conducted on 50 primary policy documents, 22 secondary data documents and 27 interviews. Findings reveal that a systems-based or integrated approach to social sustainability was not workable but not completely ineffective. Equity was prioritised by local government in both case studies, and well acknowledged as interconnected with other social goals. Although constrained in its capacity to deliver new initiatives, local government responded to neoliberalising ideologies, as well as its constituency, by strategically focusing on a particular goal, such as equity.

KEYWORDS:

• Social sustainability
• local government
• partnerships
• strategic response
• social outcomes
• neoliberalism

ORCID

Christine Slade http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2197-2824

Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank the participants in this research and acknowledge the publication funding provided by the University of the Sunshine Coast.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See the Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm 1972 at http://www.unep.org.

2 The goal of ‘sustainable development’ as stated in the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future is to seek ‘to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future’ (United Nations 1987, Chapter 1, point 49).

3 Within the literature a number of scholars use the terms ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainable development’ interchangeably, without clarifying any distinctions between the two concepts.

4 Neoliberalism is frequently used epistemically as an ‘omnibus’ term when in reality it manifests in variegated, hybrid forms; as such we use neoliberalism in this paper to refer to ‘neoliberalism-in-general’, that is, institutional responses to market-driven logics such as auditing, performance reporting, benchmarking and other re-inscriptions of institutional space (Larner 2003; Weller and O’Neill 2014).

5 In some instances the term ‘equity’ may refer more accurately to ‘equality’ but to keep the validity of the literature and data the authors have used ‘equity’ throughout the article.

6 The Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) is a measurement suite from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) that consists of four indexes which measure comparative socio-economic disadvantage using census data differentiated by geographical location.