Suchergebnisse

The authors examine the implementation of environmental regulation and demonstrate that path dependency, created largely by resource constraints, narrows the range of options for implementing regulation. It also magnifies the impact of the institutional history of the regulatory body and the impact of the disciplinary commitments of those working within the regulatory body on the implementation process. It is shown that the result is that those involved in the implementation process are unable to consider all possible routes to implementation but, rather, only a relatively few 'manageable' options for the regulation of particular activities. The arguments are examined in the context of implementation of the Water Framework Directive 2000 (WFD) in Scotland. In particular the authors focus on the regulation of diffuse pollution under the WFD and on the role played by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency in that regulation.

This paper considers the application of the sociological imagination during the analysis of data collected during an ethnographic study of an environmental regulator, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). SEPA is tasked with implementing the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) in Scotland, which will radically alter the regulation of water use. Applying a sociological imagination allowed the researcher to advocate for a more interdisciplinary and equitable understanding of sustainable water use when feeding back initial research results at the end of the data collection period. The researchers introduced socialised definitions of the environment, which linked social justice and ecological concerns. These insights provided a challenge to the traditional bio-physical science focus of the organisational participants, for whom sustainability is a relatively new addition to their duties. The paper concludes by discussing the importance of developing these interdisciplinary relationships in the future.

Governance based on partnerships has become a characteristic of late capitalist societies. This paper explores how this new collaborative approach to environmental regulation creates challenges for existing technocratic policy networks, drawing on an organisational ethnography of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. Our findings suggest partnership working is embraced for four reasons—to improve understanding of problems, to develop resource-efficient management solutions, to improve implementation of these solutions, and to improve communication and trust within the policy network. However, there appear to be three areas of difficulty. First, decisionmaking appears to be dominated by technocratic public servants; second, practical reasons for partnership, rather than embracing the normative arguments for discursive democracy, motivate most participants; and, third, participants are yet to experience the benefits of partnerships. We suggest three key areas which might address these problems and contribute towards a more successful implementation of the collaborative approach to regulation, namely to provide incentives for partnership working (demonstrating how the perceived benefits outweigh costs), developing interorganisational trust and providing organisational support (resources). We conclude with an analysis of the constraints that must be overcome to develop effective partnerships for environmental management, particularly the need to extend the network beyond the 'usual suspects' and to embrace the normative dimensions of participatory democracy.