2 - A Dutch approach: self-regulation as a policy concept

Summary

Introduction

This chapter gives a detailed overview of environmental policy in the Netherlands. The reason for presenting the Dutch case is that it has gone far in attempting to obtain the commitment of individual citizens to an explicit notion of responsibility, in order to maximize compliance to ambitious environmental planning goals. First, from 1989 onwards, successive governments in the Netherlands have been concerned to develop a framework of indicative planning that integrates environmental considerations into the full range of public policies. We shall describe this framework in the next section. A key feature of the National Environmental Policy Plans, as they are called, is the notion of an environmentally self-regulating community. In such a community, the behaviour of corporate and individual actors is subject to state policies of moral persuasion. What is of particular interest here is that Dutch environmental planning utilizes a specific type of policy instruments, the social instruments. Their purpose, to be further discussed in section 2.3, is to induce the widespread voluntary cooperation of citizens and firms with a set of detailed environmental targets, which are specified in the national plans.

In the final two sections of this chapter, we show how these policies of self-regulation, as we shall label them here, are driven by a project of moral reform, as noted by Albert Weale.