Understanding Environmental Policy Processes: A Review

Policy is an inherently political process, rather than an instrumental execution of rational decisions, where planning and implementation overlap. Different models are useful for analysing different contexts: eg. the linear model is useful for understanding environmental policies whereas an emphasis on negotiation and incrementalism is more appropriate when looking at rural resource management. They point to Foucault-inspired idea that policy is discourse, only understood if you look at the relationship between knowledge and power, whereby a political problem is recast in the neutral language of science. Their critique of technocracy, with its scientifically-driven policy making, is that it glosses over the difficulties of choosing experts and works against democracy. Science is value-laden socially-constructed knowledge and the result of competition between interest groups. The scientific enterprise involves universalising, removing uncertainties, and hiding assumptions. Given the growing public distrust of institutionalised science, greater reflexivity in the interactions between scientific institutions and the public makes sense.

They review different ways of looking at policy change: [1] as interactions between different groups with differing political interests - whether it is between competing groups, classes, or within the state [or bureaucracies more generally]. A case study of bureaucratic politics within the World Bank illustrates how effective policy making is constrained [page 17]; [2] actor-oriented approaches: policy communities and networks, interfaces, actor-network, epistemic communities, entrepreneurs/saboteurs; [3] as discourse, which is an ensemble of ideas communicated through practices via coalitions, narratives, tropes, rhetoric etc. The differences between these approaches is elegantly summarised [page 27-9]. They try to fuse the best of all three: 'structure and agency continuous and recursively interact'. As to the future, building on the explosion of participatory methods, they argue for new forms of participatory democracy with more inclusionary and reflexive policy making.