Office for Environmental Programs - Theses
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ItemCausal drivers of firm participation in private regulatory programs: A case study of the Australian Coffee Market( 2019)Australia is a leader in the global coffee world due to its dedication to high quality coffee and strong café culture. This market has become increasingly competitive as cafes and coffee roasteries have saturated urban environments across the nation. There are currently 200 Australian firms in the coffee industry participating in global supply chain certifications such as Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, UTZ and ‘the Pledge,’ yet to date few independent studies have investigated the market dynamics influencing firm decisions to participate in these voluntary programs. Private regulatory programs rely on firms to make voluntary commitments to comply with the protocols and standards set out in the scheme. However, much of the academic literature provides limited insight into the motivations and drivers for firms to voluntarily comply with private regulatory programs. In response to this gap, this thesis examines a case study of the Australian Coffee Market where a number of privately governed certifications and standards are operating and competing to regulate Australian firms. On this basis, the thesis attempts to provide credible grounds to model the types of motivations to participate and identify causal drivers to inform future investigations that seek to explain firm decisions to participate in private regulation. This thesis finds evidence that firms are motivated by a number of drivers that are contextually dependent. Firms respond that respond to ethical, norm following drivers are evidence of social constructivist theories, whilst firms driven to pursue self-interest maximisation are evidence of rational business strategies. The size of the firm is an interaction variable that enables large firms to pursue their core business values, whilst impeding the ability of small and medium sized firm from pursuing their core business values.
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ItemAlienating or engaging?: The role of ontological security and consumer coping in complex sustainable consumption environments - the case of certified wine( 2019)Consumers are in many ways made to be one of the central actors in the discourse on transitions to more sustainable consumption and production models globally. Consumption naturally spans across many industries, but one of the most significant contributors to environmental degradation, entwined in daily consumption practices, is the agriculture and food system sector. Supported, in part by market-driven and neoliberal regimes and approaches to agricultural management, private regulation, including sustainability certification have emerged strongly in the past few decades. The purpose of this research is to explore the role of sustainability certification in shifting consumer behaviour to adopt more sustainable consumption practices by taking a deeper look at consumer engagement with sustainable consumption and associated certification schemes. To probe these central questions, this paper turns to theories of trust, ontological security and coping to understand how consumers process the demands of sustainable consumption and how certification plays into this processing. An inductive, grounded theory approach was taken in analysing semi-structured interview data from 14 one-on-one interviews and one friendship group with 7 participants. Findings from the study allowed construction of a novel theoretical model which describes consumer responses to the interaction with, as well as opportunities and demands of sustainable consumption. In drawing on Giddens’ framework of ontological security and theories of coping, the model makes the following four contributions to theory: (1) It maps consumers’ dynamic coping responses as called for in the coping literature (Skinner et al., 2003), (2) it extends our view of rational and emotional trust as underlying drivers of security, (3) it demonstrates new states of ontological security (as called for by Phipps and Ozanne (2017), and (4) it extends our view and definition of ‘disruption’ and associated consumer responses. Importantly it explores an area of ‘untouchable’ security, where consumers have effectively resigned from sustainable consumption efforts, and questions to what extent collective sustainable consumption offerings may indeed be alienating consumers from sustainability transitions. The findings also develop a series of hypothesis for the implications of certification as it relates to the theoretical model. This research was undertaken in the context of the Australia domestic wine industry, using the industry’s sustainability certification, Sustainable Winegrowing Australia, as a case study.