Political Modernisation and the Environment

Since the 1970s environmental problems have been widely recognised as important social and political issues. The soil contamination of Love Canal (from the 1930s), the contamination from a fertiliser plant in Minamata Bay, Kynshu, Japan (from the 1950s), the fire at the Windscale plutonium production plant (1957), the sinking of the Torrey Canyon (1967), and the chemical fire in the Cuyahuga River (1969) are but a few frightening examples of catastrophes which awoke an environmental awareness among scientists and the public. This awareness not only concerned public health, but also became broader in an ecological sense. The destruction of nature by man affected the ‘sustenance base of ecosystems’ (Schnaiberg, 1980) and through that the living conditions of human beings on earth.

In this chapter we focus on the institutionalisation of environmental politics as this domain emerged in Western European countries from the early 1970s. Institutionalisation is used here in its sociological meaning, referring to the construction and the preservation of day-to-day activities and interactions of actors in institutions, within a context of processes of societal and political change. More specifically, institutionalisation is regarded as the process leading to the formation, deformation and reformation of policy arrangements.

In this and in the next chapter we introduce the concepts of political modernisation and policy arrangements, in order to study the plurality and dynamics of processes of institutionalisation in environmental politics. Institutionalisation not only relates to how day-to-day policy making is structured by policy arrangements which result in policy, but also to how the plurality of policy arrangements develops within a certain political context and in a specific period of time. The kind of arrangements and the plurality of these arrangements, we will argue, result from long-term processes of transformation within the political domain, which we will describe as political modernisation.

In chapter 1 we defined the concept of institutionalisation as a process of structuration and stabilisation by which policy arrangements are produced, reproduced or transformed. This process was, moreover, analysed in terms of ‘duality of structure’, which implies that change will occur through agents-ininteraction as well as through long-term structural transformations. These latter transformations were, as far as the political domain of society is concerned, conceptualised in the previous chapter as political modernisation. We consider this to be a long-term background process, the three stages of which can be characterised by certain practices and discourses with regard to governance on the one hand and by state, market and civil society interrelations on the other. As stated earlier, these successive discourses and practices give rise to different ‘ideal-types’ of policy arrangements. Although obviously coloured by their period of birth, such policy arrangements are not entirely determined by a particular stage of political modernisation, as they are the outcome of specific interactions between certain actors in day-to-day policy processes. We consider policy arrangements therefore as the concept that links long-term processes of political change with specific processes of policy making and implementation on the ground.

In this chapter postwar changes in Dutch policy arrangements in the field of transport and infrastructure will be analysed, by considering both the dominant form of policy making and the dominant form of discourse in a given period. Four phases are identified, three of which will be described in section 4.2. The main part of the chapter focuses on recent changes in Dutch infrastructure policies. Since the beginning of the 1990s a number of institutional changes have taken place. Policy making has become more transparent, new actors have been invited to participate and more attention has been paid to communication. At the same time there has been a substantial increase in the resources available for infrastructure and a strong desire to implement a large number of new infrastructure projects as soon as possible. This desire reduces the scope for public participation. These contradictory transformations will be described in section 4.3. In section 4.4 the consequences of these changes will be illustrated by examining three recent policy initiatives. Section 4.5 contains some concluding remarks.

Nature conservation policy in Europe has clearly changed and developed in the last few decades. Policy arrangements evolve both on the European level and within the member states of the European Union. The Fifth Environmental Action Programme (1992, the most recent) incorporates insights from new scientific, social and political discourses. A clear expression of this process can be found in the discourse on ‘ecological networks’. The central policy goal in this discourse is the realisation of a coherent European network of protected areas, entitled ‘Natura 2000’. Developed from scientific concepts such as island theory and metapopulation dynamics, ecological networks aim to provide the physical conditions that are necessary for species populations to survive in a landscape that to a greater or lesser extent is also exploited for economic activities. In post-modern discourse on the decline of nature, the reduction in area of many natural and semi-natural habitats and the fragmentation of large habitats into small ‘islands’ that become isolated from each other are held to be the main causes of this decline (Bennett and Wolters, 1996). The concept of ecological networks applies to the European and the national as well as the regional level. Political actors at different levels develop policy measures with the intention of connecting scattered nature areas.

The notion of green planning is used in various ways in international literature. An influential definition of green planning is ‘plans developed, mainly in industrial countries, to address escalating environmental problems’ (DalalClayton, 1996). In this definition green planning and environmental planning are considered synonyms. More recently, however, the notion of green planning has begun to incorporate a range of initiatives, including a variety of plans and strategies concerned with broader issues of sustainable development. In his study Dalal-Clayton concludes that although green planning is introduced in eighteen countries it has been done in eighteen different ways. However, most green plans produced in the industrialised countries remain focused on environmental issues; ‘very few (mainly those undertaken independently of governments) have yet attempted to balance environmental, social and economic concerns — a central requirement of moving towards sustainable development’ (Dalal-Clayton, 1996: 3). Every country shows different policy arrangements and practices of policy making to realise sustainable development. Green planning therefore seems to be a generic term; it embraces several (institutionalised) policy domains, which have the physical environment as their planning objective. Its material object is the sustainable development of society in its broadest sense, referring not only to ecological sustainability, but also to socially desirable and economically viable ways of sustainability. To realise such sustainable development the thus far fragmented policy initiatives have to be integrated. The formal objective of green planning involves its institutional dimension, which is the ability of governmental and other agencies to interfere and realise sustainable development (compare Zonneveld, 1991).

The domain of agricultural policy offers an interesting field of study for types of policy arrangements and the transformation of one type of arrangement into another. The intensity and scale of production of modern agriculture have contributed greatly to environmental problems such as eutrophication, acidification and the degradation of ecosystems. But in many countries agricultural policies are now being changed and broadened to include concern about environmental pollution by agriculture. In the European Union, the previously productivist Common Agricultural Policy is gradually being reformed into an integrated rural development policy. Due to their radical nature such policy changes are not accomplished easily. They involve conflicts of interest, lengthy negotiations, political struggles, intricate compromises and so forth, which are then institutionalised in new policy arrangements while traditional arrangements may decline.

Apart from its aim to formulate the general conclusions of the book, this final chapter is at the same time intended as a stimulus for further discussion and research. We hope to achieve this by combining and comparing the two parts of this book. Part I dealt with theories on institutionalisation, political modernisation and policy arrangements. Based upon these theories and insights, we developed a specific conceptual framework to analyse environmental policy making, centred on the ‘policy arrangements’ concept. A ‘policy arrangement’ refers to the temporary stabilisation of the organisation and substance of a policy domain at a specific level of policy making. By introducing this concept we believe it is possible to analyse the dynamics of environmental politics as being the interplay or duality between macro-processes of social and political change, understood as political modernisation, and interactions between actors in day-to-day policy processes. In part II of the book five authors applied this analytical scheme to specific domains or cases in environmental policies.