ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
its reputation with a series of hard-hitting, well-researched reports. Its assess-
ment of the government’s sustainable development strategy found that the
Sustainable Development Unit needed more powers to enable it to shift from
being merely a ‘communication centre’ to working for cross-departmental
co-operation (Environmental Audit Committee2003–04:paras. 6.1, 6.4). Over-
all, the Committee found ‘little evidence of any government department
embedding and mainstreaming sustainability inalltheir processes and
actions, although some are doing better than others’ (ibid.: para. 3.3) and
‘there is a fundamental problem, from the global to the local community
level, of too many plans and processes with too little coordination and link-
age amongst them’ (ibid.: para. 3.6). The Swedish reforms seem to have been
most successful; whilst acknowledging the persistence of conflicts between
sectoral and environmental strategies, Lundqvist ( 2004 :143–7) concludes
that definite progress has been achieved.
The Agenda 21 process has also spawned numerous specialist advisory
groupsand round-tables that sit alongside the formal administrative struc-
ture. Unfortunately, in some countries, initiatives that emerged in the early
1990s, during the peak of public environment concern and backed by par-
ticular administrations, have (as Downs’s issue attention cycle predicts – see
Box7. 5)faded in importance or have even been disbanded. President Clinton
created a President’s Council on Sustainable Development in 1993, compris-
ing twenty-five leaders from business, government and NGOs, with the aim
of finding ways of reconciling economic and environmental objectives. How-
ever, after meeting over six years and issuing several reports, it disbanded
in the face of indifference and hostility from the Republican-dominated
Congress (Bryner 2000 ;VigandKraft2006b: 375). The Ecologically Sustain-
able Development process in Australia set up nine working groups consist-
ing of representatives from government, universities, industry, trade unions,
environmental and consumer groups, which were each given the responsi-
bility for producing strategic recommendations in a core policy area such
as agriculture, manufacturing and transport. Although many of the recom-
mendations in their 1991 reports were taken on board, these groups were
allowed to disappear, and no effort was made to institutionalise their ‘pro-
ductive and promising discourse’ into government (Walker 2002 : 264; Howes
2005 :115–26).
Elsewhere, the reform process has put down deeper roots. Early British
government initiatives setting up advisory groups and round-tables drawing
on representatives from civil society, were subsumed into a new Sustainable
Development Commission in 2000, an ‘independent watchdog’ that reports
direct to the Prime Minister and whose first head was the environmental
activist, Jonathan Porritt. The Finnish government set up a National Com-
mission on Sustainable Development in 1993 whose members included the
prime minister, senior ministers and representatives from local government,
churches, trade unions and the media. While none of these groups has exer-
cised great influence, they mostly persevere, drip-feeding ideas and reports