ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
The empirical evidence supporting the widespread existence of closed
policy communities is strongest in Britain, where it reflects central fea-
tures of the political system such as the strong executive and the cul-
ture of secrecy (Marsh and Rhodes 1992 ;Smith 1993 ). For example, during
the post-war period transport policy has generally emerged from a pol-
icy community consisting of officials from the Department of Transport
and representatives from the motor industry, road construction industry,
oil industry and various road haulage and motoring organisations (Dudley
and Richardson 1996 ;Rawcliffe 1998 :121–3). Consequently, British trans-
port policy has been heavily biased towards road-building and encouraging
car use, with little interest in alternative, less environmentally damaging
forms of transport such as railways or cycling. Similarly, for many years a
policy community dominated by the Atomic Energy Authority and its sci-
entific experts underpinned the strong commitment of successive govern-
ments to the development of the nuclear power industry as a clean, cheap
source of electricity (Greenaway et al. 1992 : 233–4; Saward 1992 ). Tight policy
communities have also been identified in other areas affecting the environ-
ment, including the energy and water industries (Ward and Samways 1992 ;
Maloney and Richardson 1994 ). Several studies suggest that policy commu-
nities are also to be found in environmental policymaking elsewhere in
Europe, including the water (Bressers et al. 1994 )andenergy (Kasa 2000 )
sectors.
Theagriculture sectorprovides a classic illustration of how policy communi-
ties have hampered the development of sustainable environmental policies
in a range of European countries, including Denmark (Daugbjerg 1998 ), Fin-
land (Jokinen 1997 ), the Netherlands (Glasbergen 1992 ) and Britain (Cox et al.
1986 ;Smith 1990 ). In each case the policy community normally consists of
officials from the agriculture ministry and leading farmers’ groups. The
British policy community, for example, primarily involves the Department
forEnvironment, Food and Rural Affairs (until 2001, Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries and Food) and the National Farmers’ Union (NFU). It first emerged
in the late 1930s and was formalised in the Agriculture Act 1947 when farm-
ers were given a statutory right to be consulted over policy. The members
were bound together by the shared belief that farmers should maximise
the output and efficiency of their land. The state deliberately created the
policy community to ensure a secure war-time food supply and, to do so,
it was prepared to guarantee prices to farmers (Smith 1990 ). It suited both
thefarming ministry and the NFU to plan a mutually beneficial expan-
sionist agricultural policy and to maintain this arrangement after the war.
The policy community was, therefore, a result of a structural feature – a
political context that demanded a secure food supply – that subsequently
institutionalised the power of the NFU.
In most of the EU-15 states, but particularly in Britain, Denmark and
theNetherlands, the objective of agricultural policy has been to stimulate
the competitive position of the agrarian sector by adopting increasingly