View from the Inside: UK Environmental Policy Seen from a Practitioner’s Perspective

Abstract

My perspective is that of a practitioner, not a student, of UK environmental policy. I have spent the last 20 years trying to do things about environmental problems rather than to simply study them. I have been fortunate in having had a chance to do that both from outside Government, as Director of Green Alliance (and formerly, of Friends of the Earth), and for the past few years from inside Government, as Special Adviser to the last three Secretaries of State for the Environment. This is a transition of roles which is sadly unusual in the British political system. As a result, I do not pretend to give here an objective or analytical view of UK environmental policy. Indeed, I am rather sceptical about attempts to subject the processes of environmental politics and policy to objective analysis in terms of precise models (see below for my scepticism about economic models developed to substantiate the case for market instruments as a substitute for command and control methods of environmental regulation). I am more comfortable with the considerable untidiness of actual events.