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The highly industrialized western countries, which have been actively pursuing environmental policy since the 1960s with an emphasis on air and water pollution control, have achieved considerable reductions in sulphur dioxide and dust emissions. Thanks to large-scale public investment, adequate facilities for waste water treatment have also become common. On the other hand, emissions of other equally relevant pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides and heavy metals, have not been reduced to the same extent; in the case of hydrocarbons a considerable need for reduction remains. In spite of the climate protection policies initiated in the mid-1990s, carbon dioxide emissions are still increasing, in the northern hemisphere in particular. These emissions are mainly caused by fossil fuel consumption in all kinds of combustion processes and considered as a prime cause of the green-house effect (main source: traffic). In spite of major investments in domestic and industrial water treatment plants, the success achieved in general water-pollution control can only be described as marginal. And in spite of increasing efforts in the area of agro-environmental policy, there has been no significant reduction in the contamination of ground and drinking water and in the eutrophication of stagnant surface waters arising from widespread fertilizer use. Other issues of concern in this context include the rapid extinction of plant and animal species throughout the world and the ongoing and virtually unhindered irreversible destruction of natural areas.

The ideas presented in the following pages are based on comparative research—mainly international in scope—which the author has undertaken since the late ’seventies into three areas of environmental policy (maintenance of clean air in proximity to stationary sources of pollution, maintenance of clean air in proximity to mobile sources of pollution, and water protection in agriculture) in countries of Western Europe. Based on the author’s postgraduate course on environmental policy and management in the Institut de hautes études en administration publique (IDHEAP) of the University of Lausanne, experience gained from Swiss environmental policy will also be drawn upon. Since the mid-eighties the author has participated in training officials in the Swiss federal, cantonal and communal administrations having responsibilities in relation to the environment. The discussion on observation of the environment is based on the groundwork accomplished since 1988 by the Swiss Commission for Observation of the Environment (“Schweizerische Kommission für Umweltbeobachtung”) of which the author is Chairman. Further reading is indicated in the appended References.

Recent studies from the field of implementation research (e.g. ; ; ) have indicated clearly that a strict division according to content cannot be made between processes of programme formulation and those of implementation from a theoretical-analytical standpoint, and that such a division further leads to unrealistic presentations of empirical policy processes. “Implementation does not assume a fully articulated policy decision: it creates and recreates it”. Furthermore, “implementation ⋯ must reformulate as well as carry out policy” (). This view could hardly be debated on the abstract level. However, it neither aids a practice-oriented formulation of theory concerning the specific methods of function of administrative policy enforcement, nor does it serve the practical “enforcement policy” built upon this.

On the basis of a large international comparative study of implementation policies from 14 different regional implementation systems (RIS) from the Federal Republic of Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy and the Netherlands, we first tried to identify the impact of regional policies in terms of their capacity to influence the behaviour of individual emitters within selected local implementation areas (LIA). For each of the 14 regions we selected two to three LIAs with different structures of industrial and domestic SO emitters. We aimed at having one of the three LIAs as a metropolitan areas, the second one as a heavily industrialized area and the third one with a somehow mixed emitters structure. Within each of these local areas we tried to compare changes over time in the local ambient air quality (“immission” data in the field of sulphur dioxide — SO), relating these to the total amount of emission produced by local emitters. In a second step we tried to find out, by means of interviews conducted with the main emitters, the different motives behind observed changes in their behaviour.

In the beginning was a conflict between the Swiss parliament and a federal ministry. In the end, an institution, a federal agency was evaluated. At the very beginning, the question was whether the merging of two federal agencies would mean the creation of a higher organisational unit, for which parliamentary approval would have been necessary, or whether it is simply a question of merging the two agencies to form the Federal Office for Environmental Protection (FOEP). At the end, this new federal agency was the subject of an evaluative study. The present study is about this evaluation.

It is hardly surprising that the European Science Foundation chose environmental policy instruments as the topic of one if its task forces on “environmental policy”. This choice testifies the fact that environmental policy lacks the belief that it can achieve its goals with the classical environmental policy instruments. After twenty years of hard work of implementation, many policymakers arrived at the conclusion that its instruments must be supplemented by new, more efficient tools. It seems that after a swift boom in the late 1970s and 1980s, in the light of its current overarching political importance, has already for some time considerably transgressed the simple frame of ordinary policing in the field of health or industrial supervision. More recently, in the search for new instruments, theory and practical experiences of environmental policy has borrowed increasingly from fiscal and tax policy. Moreover, the slowly adopted practice of environmental impact assessments (EIE) had led to first attempts to build a bridge with industrial, land use and infrastructure policy. The EIS requires the application of an environmental law in the planning and realization of new projects of all governmental policies of environmental relevance. The postulate has always been included in all the relevant laws and at least since the Single European Act of Luxembourg (1987) it figured in the pertinent body of primary law of the European Community (Art, 130 R, Para. 2). In the Maastricht Treaties it received additional normative reinforcement.

In the course of general environmental discussion agriculture has come increasingly under fire. Modern agricultural activities in the western industrialized countries have a number of serious ecological drawbacks. These vary in scale and across problem areas, relative to country. Recent political debate within western European countries focuses in particular upon the following aspects.

The clear and widely accepted distinction between regulatory, distributive and redistributive policies with regard to programme structures, policy instruments and administrative arrangements, originally suggested by () might be the main theoretical reason for the fact that the distribution issue has only exceptionally been analysed explicitly in regulatory policy formation and implementation processes. Without directly raising his issue, a considerable volume of environmental policy research illuminates the existence of selective interest consideration in regulatory programme formation patterns. The very existence or absence of public regulation in comparable problem areas can reflect the exercise of selective attention in issue generation processes, resulting in an unequal distribution of public regulation resources amongst competing social groups. Further-more it is well known that once established, regulatory policies may discriminate against certain enterprises or affected individuals. This again reflects implicit distributional decisions.

Since the late 1980s, the natural and social sciences, environmental administrations and statistics offices in many European countries have been trying to record “policy” in addition to the traditional data on the state of the environment and changing socio-economic and socio-cultural factors. Up to now, efforts to document political-administrative decisions as definitive dimensions for changes in environmental quality in a sufficiently operational form and in this way relate them to environmental data have not had much success. This contribution argues that the reason for these difficulties lies in the previous lack of co-operation between environmental monitoring and traditional policy evaluation. It presents a concept, which has been tested in practice and links the dimensions of traditional scientific environmental monitoring with those of policy analysis. Hence it enables the documentation of “policy” in spatial and temporal terms with the help of a geographical information system (GIS) which means it can be used as an operational explicative dimension in the natural environment.

Significant differences can be observed in the degree of success with which the eight problem areas of classical environmental policy have been dealt over the past 25 years. Least progress has been achieved in the areas of noise, nature and landscape, whereas the most significant improvements can be observed in the areas of waste and the prevention of major incidents. The levels of success attained in the other four environmental policy problem areas (water, air, soil and substances) lay between these two extremes. The situation in the individual areas can be summarised as follows