ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
Mainstream political leaders may come to accept that certain powerful
environmental groups can no longer be excluded from the policy pro-
cess, so they force a change upon a sub-system. A change of government
can have the same outcome: the Green involvement in the German coali-
tion government in 1998 led directly to the decision to phase out nuclear
power.
Indeed, nuclear power provides an interesting example of policy change
because, as the following case study shows, a combination of exogenous
factors has profoundly disrupted established patterns of policymaking to
produce a radical reversal of the previous pro-nuclear consensus – although
this transformation may not be permanent.Critical question 4
Under what conditions is radical reform of environmental policy possible?◗ The rise and fall (and rise again?) of nuclear power
The potential threats to human safety and the environment posed by the
use of nuclear power highlight many of the core characteristics of envi-
ronmental policy identified in this chapter. As the catastrophic explosion
at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986 demonstrated, there can be few
other issues that pose such apotentiallyirreversible, transnational and long-
termthreat to the environment as nuclear power – even if the actual risk of
damage is statistically extremely low. Despite these concerns, from the late
1950s to the 1980s, as strong pro-nuclear policy communities developed,
most industrialised nations invested heavily in the expansion of nuclear
energy. Yet, remarkably, since the 1980s, an extraordinary coincidence of
exogenous factors has profoundly weakened these entrenched policy com-
munities, resulting in a dramatic reversal of the enthusiastic pro-nuclear
consensus amongst policy elites. By the mid-1990s, most North American and
Western European nations had abandoned all plans to build new nuclear
reactors and the industry appeared to be in terminal crisis. A decade on,
there isgrowingevidence of renewed government interest in nuclear power
in an ironic new guise: as a carbon-free energy solution to mitigate climate
change.
Historically, decisions about nuclear power generally emerged from tight-
knit, closed policy communities or corporatist institutional arrangements.
In Britain, for example, the policy process was dominated by the Atomic
Energy Authority (UKAEA) – a government-funded, largely unaccountable,
cross-breed between a ministry and a nationalised industry – and its scien-
tific experts – with the Department of Energy only a secondary actor in the
policy community (Greenaway et al. 1992 :ch.6; Saward 1992 ). The govern-
ment gave the policy community its full support and ensured that it was
subject to minimal democratic control via Parliament.