ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
be less applicable in countries where conflict is less open, as in the ́etatist
French system, or where closed policy communities prevail, as in Britain
(but see Sabatier 1998 ). Nevertheless, where policy processes are pluralistic,
which is often the case with environmental issues, the ACF can be a useful
tool for explaining policy outcomes. Within EU institutions, for instance,
much policymaking affecting the environment is made within open issue
networks that offer interest groups better access to policy elites than is nor-
mally available at the national level (Bomberg1998b). Coalitions made up
of lobbyists and politicians have frequently emerged around divisive issues
such as the biotechnology, waste packaging and auto-emissions directives,
with each coalition seeking to control the policy networks in order to shape
policy outcomes.
According to all these ideas-based approaches – agenda-setting, the ACF
and even the discourse framework (see Box7. 7)–change in environmen-
tal policy is easier to achieve where policymaking is relatively pluralistic
than where it is dominated by closed policy networks (although there is no
guarantee that the policy outcomes will be better for the environment as
industry coalitions will often prevail over environmental coalitions because
theycan mobilise more resources in an exercise of one-dimensional power).
Even then, however,radicalchange is rare because without major exogenous
changes there are few windows of opportunity to provide access to different
interests and advocacy coalitions that can push new issues and ideas onto
the policyagenda.◗ Policy communities and exogenous change
The strength of policy network analysis lies in its capacity to explain con-
tinuity and stability, but it has been widely criticised for offering a static
model that is poor at explaining policy change (Dowding 1995 ; Dudley and
Richardson 1996 ). After all, if a policy community is stable, why should it
ever introduce changes that are not directly in the interests of its members?
Yetnosub-system is immune from external developments. Just as Sabatier
recognised that radical change requires the belief systems of policy elites to
be shaken up by exogenous non-cognitive factors, similarly network analysts
have identified a number of structural factors that may destabilise a strongly
institutionalised policy community and so make policy change more likely
(Smith 1993 : 93–7). In short, exogenous factors can play a catalytic role in
changing power relations. Five external factors seem particularly significant
in shaping environmental policy.- Asudden crisismay throw a policy community into disarray. The dis-
covery of a link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and the
human disease new-variant Creutzfeld–Jakob disease in 1996 provoked a
food scare so enormous that the EU introduced a complete ban on the
export of British beef, profoundly weakening the powerful agricultural pol-
icy community. During 2000–1, the discovery of BSE elsewhere in Europe