Greening governmentIreland) and food safety (Iceland, the UK). Even more broadly, Belgium has a
Ministry for Social Affairs, Public Health and the Environment. Whilst a big-
ger ministry might give a minister more influence within the government,
sometimes environmental issues may struggle to reach the top of the ME
agenda.
The power of an ME is influenced by various factors. The political context is
critical, notably the level of public concern about the environment and the
salience of the issue, which will largely determine the degree of leadership
interest. Critical internal factors include the size of the budget and a healthy
staffcomplement, particularly if, as in Norway, the ME has its own field
organisation of inspectors, scientists and other professionals (Jansen et al.
1998 : 303). For the ME to act as an effective advocate for the environment,
its staff may need to be drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds, so that
hard-nosed technocrats, such as engineers, agronomists and economists, are
balanced by biologists and environmental managers who by instinct and
training are more likely to be ‘environmentalists’.
The concentration of environmental responsibilities in a single ministry
has undoubtedly given greater prominence to environmental matters within
government and improved policy co-ordination. The restructuring of func-
tional responsibilities arising from the formation of an ME may disrupt
established policy networks or advocacy coalitions, perhaps bringing policy
areas traditionally dominated by producer groups within the remit of an ME
more willing to listen to the environmental lobby. Where MEs are relatively
strong, notably in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands
(Andersen and Liefferink1997b: 32), they have sufficient autonomy to pro-
vide the focus for more powerful coalitions of environmental and consumer
interests. Territorial wars may result from attempts by an ME, particularly
as it becomes more established, to contest responsibility for a particular pol-
icy area. Thus land use and food safety issues have traditionally been the
responsibility of agriculture ministries, but MEs have increasingly demanded
control over these activities because they have a major impact on the envi-
ronment. Yet neither the small, focused model nor the large, wide-ranging
model has overcome the entrenched sectoral divisions of government. Con-
flict between MEs and the economic ministries remains endemic. Politically
weakand often faced by an alliance of opposing ministers, the ME is fre-
quently outgunned in interministry disputes, unless the minister is a par-
ticularly astute coalition-builder. This is a major problem because in most
countries the ME has responsibility for implementing sustainable develop-
ment across government.
The ME is usually the sponsor for a range of regulatory agencies respon-
sible for the implementation of environmental legislation and policy.
The administrative history of environmental regulation typically follows
asimilar pattern to that of the development of MEs, with an increasing
concentration of responsibilities that were previously fragmented across
many different departments and levels of government. The pioneering