Browsing by Author "Sinner J"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Discourse, agency, and social license to operate in New Zealand
    (The Resilience Alliance, 17/01/2020) Newton M; Farrelly T; Sinner J
    The construction of discourse through choice of wording and sentence structure can affect power relations between people and groups. Social license to operate (SLO), broadly defined as the public’s acceptance or approval of a company and its operations, is an emergent concept in New Zealand’s marine economy. The way the public discourse around SLO is constructed and communicated can empower some at the expense of others, whether deliberately or inadvertently. This study employed critical discourse analysis to investigate how SLO is used in public documents relating to commercial activities in New Zealand’s marine environment between 1996 and 2017. Specifically, the study explores the implied power relations between government, industry, New Zealand’s Indigenous tribes (hereafter, iwi), communities, and other stakeholders. We find that industry and central government dominate SLO-related public discourse, and they frequently vest SLO agency with industry rather than community groups, iwi, or the wider public. Indeed, iwi are largely absent from the SLO discourse in public documents. Definitions of SLO vary extensively across the documents and are largely captured by industry and central government. We conclude that New Zealand’s marine SLO public discourse empowers industry at the expense of communities and the public, contrary to the notional intent of the concept.
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    Dissecting the Discourse of Social Licence to Operate
    (1/08/2018) Sinner J; Newton M; Farrelly T
    The term “social licence to operate”, or SLO, has increasingly featured in public discussion about commercial operations in the marine environment. As part of the Sustainable Seas National Challenge, we are studying how this term is being used in New Zealand and its implications for industry-community relations.
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    Four propositions about how valuation intervenes in local environmental politics
    (John Wiley and Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society, 2020-02) Tadaki M; Sinner J; Šunde C; Giorgetti A; Glavovic B; Awatere S; Lewis N; Stephenson J
    1. Environmental valuation provides a way of soliciting and organising information about how people relate to their environments. By canvassing a broad spectrum of human–nature relationships, valuation practice seeks to make environmental decision-making more inclusive of diverse human concerns and aspirations. 2. When valuation is undertaken in real-world decision-making settings, choices must be made about how to adapt valuation into context. Generic guidance illuminates choices of theory and method, as well as practical issues such as cost and complexity; however, little guidance exists on how to understand and respond to the political implications of valuation in places. 3. To address this, we develop four propositions on how valuation intervenes into conflicted environmental decision-making contexts, drawing on interviews with government officials and marine values-holders from Aotearoa New Zealand's Marlborough Sounds. 4. Valuation intervenes in politics by (i) vesting certain scales and actors with authority, (ii) aligning with or contesting existing regulatory categories, (iii) reallocating expertise about the environment and (iv) reproducing or reworking the uneven playing field of decision-making. Understanding these implications can support valuation practitioners to situate their work within locally relevant contexts and objectives. 5. These propositions provide a way of grasping the mechanisms through which valuation intervenes in local political struggles for environmental authority. Using these prompts, and developing others, can help valuation practitioners to ‘do good’ through seeking place-based environmental justice and sustainability.