The Netherlands: An integrated, participatory approach to environmental policymaking

Abstract

Before digging into the history of environmental policy in The Netherlands it is useful to explain our perspective. By ‘institutionalisation’ we mean the social process in which agencies make agreements, make rules, use language, use expressions and so on, in short, produce social structures that start to ‘live their own lives’ and that, in turn, partly determine the actions of these same agencies (Giddens, 1984). In our domain, social practices are about environmental policy and politics. Our focus is to explain continuity and change in what we call policy arrangements, that is policy actors and coalitions, discourses, rules of the game, and resources.