Key issues

1. ◗ What are the core characteristics of environmental problems?

2. ◗ What theories and models explain environmental policymaking?

3. ◗ Where does power lie in environmental policymaking?

4. ◗ What are the structural and institutional barriers to policy change?

5. ◗ Why does policy change?

Policymakers have been slow to recognise or acknowledge that environmental problems might require special treatment. When new environmental imperatives emerged during the 1960s, forcing policymakers to confront the environment as a broad policy issue for the first time, all governments adopted a technocentric perspective, which regarded environmental problems as the unfortunate side-effects of economic growth (see Box 3.10). It was assumed that most environmental problems had solutions and that there was no need to question the underlying commitment to economic growth or to the political-institutional structures of the modern liberal democratic state. The standard approach to environmental problems – here called the ‘traditional policy paradigm’ – was reactive, tactical, piecemeal and end-of-pipe. This traditional paradigm has been found wanting, unable to stem long-standing problems of pollution and resource depletion or to deal with the new tranche of global problems that have emerged in recent years. Consequently, the traditional paradigm has increasingly been challenged by the alternative paradigm of sustainable development. Yet, despite the mounting environmental crisis and the rhetorical commitment of policy elites to sustainable development, many elements of the traditional model remain firmly entrenched, even in those countries that have pioneered progressive environmental policies (Andersen and Liefferink 1997a). Why has this traditional paradigm proved so resilient?