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ABSTRACT
Sustainability has become an important ingredient in contemporary public policy. However, considerable ambiguity surrounds the precise meaning of sustainability in concrete policy contexts, such as financial sustainability in local government. Using recent Australian national and state public inquiries into fiscal sustainability in local government as an illustrative example, this paper considers the tensions that derive from the dual role of local government as local democratic institution and an efficient local service provider, and the difficulties involved in defining fiscal sustainability adequately. It is argued that the concept of sustainability cannot be meaningfully fully reduced to narrow accounting measures in local government. Financial sustainability would thus be more accurately described as financial viability in local government, with the term sustainability in local government employed to cover local action directed at global sustainability.
1. INTRODUCTION
Sustainability has come to occupy an important role in contemporary public policy discourse and this trend has also been reflected in the local government literature. While the concept of sustainability has much to offer the analysis of local government, especially the fact that it obliges scholars and practitioners alike to consider the inter-temporal dimension of local government policy making, significant difficulties exist in giving precise meaning to the term in the local government milieu. The concept of sustainability first emerged in the development literature through the work of the World Commission on Environment and Development ("Brundtland Commission") (1987: 8), which defined sustainable development as a process that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". A key element of this definition lay in its conflation of environmental concerns with economic growth which had previously been juxtaposed (Romero-Lankao, 2000). As a consequence, the Brundtland Commission (1987) definition was rapidly adopted by a wide range of writers since it served as a unifying umbrella term for a diversity of perspectives on development. However, the consensual nature of this definition came at the price of ambiguity and imprecision (Adger and Jordan, 2009; Leuenberger and Bartle, 2009), which has now fragmented into "dozens of definitions are being passed around among experts and politicians, because many and diverse interests and visions hide behind the common key-idea" (Sachs, 1995: 8).
The disintegration of the earlier...