Abstract
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY MAKING AND POLICY IMPMEMENTATION IN THE NETHERLANDS
This thesis is an analysis of environmental policy making and policy implementation in the Netherlands as it was conducted in the seventies, the first decade of political and policy responses to environmental deterioration. The thesis is an effort to disentangle the fabric and functioning of a field of public policy where governments often have been unable to produce substantial results. The case of the Netherlands has been no exeption to that pattern.
The main concern is to describe and explain how environmental policies have been carried out, and additionally, how the outcome of the implementation can be explained. In particular, the thesis is an effort to examine how the implementation has been affected and structured by other stages of the public policy making process than just implementation. Three perspectives on implementation are applied where the relationship between various stages of a policy life-cycle is important. The perspectives are (1) implementation as symbolic politics; (2) implementation as group-relations; and (3) implementation as evolution.
The framework of the empirical analysis is built-up around three sets of independant variables. These are: (1) Characteristics of background variables; (2) characteristics of the governmental structure; and (3) characteristics of the policies. The analysis shows that these variables have had a strong impact on the ability to implement the policies in the field of environmental protection. Although a variety of obstacles have been observed, the general conclusion is that there has been a fundamental gap between the nature of the problem(s) and the political and policy responses to the problem(s): Whereas the problems represented an interconnected chain of causes and effects, the policies tended to be compartmental, incidental and ad-hoc. In addition, fragmentation has also been a core
feature of the governmental structure: Between the various ministries as well as between the central governmental level and the local government. In other words, the environmental policy making and policy implementation in the seventies were too fragmented to produce substantial results.
The most important source of information for this thesis has been the available written material. The thesis is in other words a secondary analysis. However, the written sources have have been supplemented by interviews, discussions and comments from a number of people. In addition, lectures on the subject formed yet another valuable source of information and insight.