Greening governmentthat all governments produce a national plan and made few commitments
regarding implementation. In the USA and Canada, Agenda 21 has virtually
no domestic political salience (Lafferty and Meadowcroft2000a), whilst the
German document was not translated into German or even published there
(Beuermann and Burdick 1997 : 90). These plans are a step towards a more
strategic and comprehensive approach to environmental policy, but one com-
parative study of sixteen green plans concluded that they are little more
than ‘pilot strategies... a first step towards intersectoral communication’
(J ̈anicke and J ̈orgens 1998 : 47). The goals are generally inadequate, there are
fewnewpolicy initiatives, the commitments are vague and only a handful
of (mostly qualitative) targets are identified. The timidity of these plans usu-
ally reflects the compromises that governments have to make with powerful
economic sectors and producer interests. Another comparative study, whilst
acknowledging the limitations and instability of many of these plans, does
identify two positive trends. First, there is a tendency for goals, especially in
Sweden, Britain and Canada, to become more carefully defined over time,
with measurable targets to judge success. Indeed, several countries, such
as Sweden and Britain (DEFRA2005a), have subsequently produced new or
significantly updated strategy documents. Secondly, there is a strengthening
of collaborative and participatory dimensions within the strategic planning
process in several countries, notably the Netherlands, as governments recog-
nise the need to consult more widely to find and legitimate solutions to
complex environmental challenges (Lafferty and Meadowcroft2000b: 356–
72).
The pioneering model of a green plan is the Dutch National Environmen-
tal Policy Plan (NEPP), a wide-ranging and ambitious strategy that, from
its launch in 1989, was widely praised as a genuine ‘success’ (Weale 1992 ;
J ̈anicke and J ̈orgens 1998 ). The aim of NEPP was to improve both intersec-
toralco-ordination of policy and intrasectoral integration of environmental
considerations into the day-to-day policy processes in core ministries such
as transport, energy and agriculture. NEPP explicitly rejected the reorgan-
isation of thestructureof government in favour of an approach based on
inventingprocessesof policy planning that establish co-ordination and inte-
gration (Weale 1992 :148). At its core was a set of 50 strategic objectives,
with over 200 specific quantitative targets to be achieved by various dates
up to 2010. The objective of reducing acidification, for example, was accom-
panied by costed targets setting out percentage reductions in the level of
emissions of critical chemicals such as SO 2 and N 2 O, which in turn were
broken down into individual targets for different activities such as traffic,
energy supply, industry and households (Weale 1992 :125–6). This process
of target-setting was repeated for other environmental problems includ-
ing climate change, eutrophication and waste disposal. Having been agreed
by the four key ministries of environment, economics (industry), transport
and agriculture, NEPP provided the environment ministry with the tools to