Developing Environmentally Respectful Policy Programmes: Five Key Principles

In contemporary governance situations, varying, but often similar, ecological, economic, cultural and social challenges are experienced by differing stakeholder groups in a variety of policy sectors. To meet such challenges requires attention both to policy agendas and to policy processes, the ways in which policy is developed. This paper sets out some principles for policy making that can help to meet these challenges while acknowledging the inevitable limits to policy success. Such principles have particular pertinence in relation to environmental issues that often suffer from being divorced from mainstream institutional structures and often lack policy communities with a specific remit to champion their concern. The authors suggest that to maximize success and minimize failure, policy processes must be deliberative rather than solely technocratic and should attempt as far as possible to: articulate their message clearly; frame activity in the policy sector and as far as possible help guide strategies and programmes in other relevant sectors; help co-ordinate policy interventions through links to other policy communities operating across differing spatial scales; be legitimized through working with a broad range of stakeholder groups; and mobilize stakeholders toward implementing programme goals.