It is said that politics is the art of the possible, and so the discipline of public policy is the art and craft of implementing the possible. Especially in resource and environmental management, where allocation of environmental goods and bads' is the core task, public policy has focused on procedural justice (although rarely using those words) in terms of seeking greater and more constructive modes of public participation and community engagement. This has produced a very large body of theory and practice. Although modelling of distributional outcomes are often a large part of input into decisions, the fairness of eventual outcomes is less a focus. This chapter looks at how concepts of environmental justice can inform public policy in the environmental domain, concluding that a more nuanced and robust lexicon and knowledge of justice would be a positive contribution. Conversely, public policy can guide justice research towards points in the policy and institutional system where justice might be pursued to greater or lesser effect. This book presents a range of Australian perspectives, applied across different resource and environmental management contexts, from the relatively new and still fluid and contested field of environmental justice. Environmental justice seeks fairness - variously in process or outcome - across groups in a human population in the policy and management that decides on and assigns access (or not) to natural resources and environmental assets. At times, it explores justice for the environment itself, or living parts of the environment. Pragmatically, as noted in Chapter 2, environmental justice more often seeks to identify and mitigate injustices or actual or perceived unfairness. We can postulate that this is simply because such instances will be brought to the attention of governments and the public rather than just or fair outcomes (no headlines there!), and because perfectly' just outcomes are at once unknowable and certainly always contestable depending on one's perspective and interests. Fundamentally, environmental and natural resource management policy is, like all public policy, about the allocation of resources, access and privileges - whether of water, timber, fish stocks, health care, open space, recreational opportunities, transport routes, emergency services, minerals, or protection from the negative products of human activities such as pollution or noise. Public policy, as both a discipline and practice, seeks to provide structure, transparency and defensible processes underpinning such allocations of 'goods and bads' (generally, see Howlett et al. 2009; specific to environment, Dovers and Hussey 2013). Public policy deals with fairness and justice in ways qualitative and fungible, or quantitative and rigid, and sometimes leaves judgement to the courts when procedures to cater for fairness are deemed unfulfilled. Public policy also leaves significant justice and other value decisions to elected governments and their constituent parts (first ministers, ministers, Cabinet), in a parliamentary liberal democracy. The warning of Davis and colleagues, emphasis in original) is apposite: Politics is the essential ingredient for producing workable policies, which are more publicly accountable and politically justifiable ... While some are uncomfortable with the notion that politics can enhance rational decision-making, preferring to see politics as expediency, it is integral to the process of securing defensible outcomes. We are unable to combine values, interests and resources in ways which are not political. (Davis et al. 1993: 257) Values, interests and resources: the last of these, resources, can be in most cases measured; interests can be at least identified and possibly managed; but values are more political or moral, difficult if not impossible to measure, individually or socially formed and negotiated, and always contestable and resistant to the analyses and trade-offs that are the stock-intrade of attempts at 'rational' public policy processes. Justice is a value matter, and thus fundamentally a matter of politics, in whatever social arena those politics are played out. This introduction, and the role of politics, prompts a crucial distinction. Environmental justice - for the moment recognising just the two predominant forms discussed - concerns both the process of reaching decisions around allocation (procedural justice) and the fairness of the outcomes (distributive justice). Public policy, and the environmental and resource management regimes thus shaped, is concerned overwhelmingly with process: the institutions, organisational settings, rules, norms and practicalities of policies as they are formulated and implemented within the political system. Public policy may shape, but does not determine, political decisions. Whatever judgements may arise from normal procedures of review of policy implementation - Senate inquiries, independent evaluations or investigations by an Auditor- General - these will only judge fairness of process or outcomes against what the policy stated would happen. If the outcome is demonstrably unfair, or strongly argued to be, but is consistent with the original intent, then that may be remarked upon but not judged as wrong. An unfair allocation policy, or one with skewed distributional impacts (and there are many such), is not, from a public policy perspective, a failed policy: it may be as intended by the government or key political figure who set the parameters, supported by sufficiently numerous or powerful actors in the wider policy and political system. To that extent, public policy is a less normative enterprise than environmental justice, whatever individuals in the process may personally believe or desire. Scholars and practitioners of public policy tend not to use the term 'justice' but rather less strict enunciations of fairness. If justice is considered, it tends to be in the hands of what public policy would view as the proper arbiters - the court that overturns a decision or process, the electorate who ejects a government or politician they think made unfair decisions, or the media pressure that reacts to or inflames public rage and forces the reversal of a decision. In this chapter, I first note how environmental and natural resource policy seeks to allow as wide as possible or permissible input into formulating policy, and how it seeks to achieve at least tolerable outcomes in allocation, which are not open to the perception or proof of unfairness. The question is then asked: how can the ideas from the field of environmental justice inform questions of public participation and of tolerable, or at least transparent, fairness in the outcomes of decisions that seek to consider values, interests and resources in allocation of goods and bads? That is, what might environmental justice contribute to public policy in this domain? Along the way, we might ponder the converse, too: what can environmental justice learn from public policy?
