“The man, the administration and the counter-discourse”: An analysis of the sudden turn in Dutch nature conservation policy
Section snippets
A sudden turn in Dutch nature policy
Until recently, the Netherlands was seen by many as one of the leading nations in European nature conservation policy. It has played an important role in the development of a common European nature policy (Van den Top and Van der Zouwen, 2002). The Natura 2000 ecological network was inspired by experiences with the Dutch National Ecological Network (NEN) (Keulartz, 2009) and the Netherlands played a pioneering role in the development of the habitat-directive (Van den Top and Van der Zouwen, 2002
Discursive institutionalism
To analyse the sudden turn in Dutch nature policy, we need a framework that connects and explains institutional stability (‘the social contract’) as well as abrupt policy change (halting of implementation, severe budget cuts, new ideas about ‘appropriate’ nature conservation). Discursive-institutionalism exactly promises to do this by analysing institutional crises from an ideational perspective (Schmidt, 2008). Abrupt institutional changes are explained by emerging or undercurrent ideas and
The rise of the conservation/development discourse
The founding of the Society for preservation of nature monuments (Natuurmonumenten) in 1905 is often seen as the start of nature protection in the Netherlands. At start, nature protection was mostly a combination of private enterprise and civil society (De Lijster, 2011, Van der Windt, 1995). Although from the 1940s the involvement of the national government started to increase, only from 1970 onwards (Van der Windt, 1995) the national government became dominant and created several policies to
Institutionalization of the discourse
Probably the most remarkable effect of the rise of the new discourse was the swift institutionalization of crucial elements of this discourse in the early 1990s, such as the development of new nature, a focus on species and biodiversity. The discourse was supported by a broad, strong and stable coalition of actors, including the ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Fisheries (nowadays merged into the Ministry of Economic Affairs), provincial governments, leading ecologists and most nature
Rise of critical discourses
Ever since the institutionalization of the conservation/development discourse, also critical discourses, or counter-discourses emerged (e.g. Keulartz and Korthals, 1997). Primarily, these critical discourses argued against the pro-active strategy of the newly established Dutch nature policy which threatened existing cultural landscapes, such as the well-known, highly appreciated but highly modified Dutch floodplains (Wiering and Arts, 2006). However, the conservation/development discourse was
Discursive struggle and de-institutionalization
This all changed drastically with the installation of a new government coalition, often referred to as the ‘Rutte 1’ administration (name of the prime minister), in October 2010. The new coalition, based on the liberal-conservative party (VVD) and the Christian democrats (CDA) with confidence supply from the Populist-conservatives party (PVV), was seen as the most right wing government the Netherlands had seen since the Second World War. Moreover, these parties had expressed themselves the most
Discursive-institutional dynamics in Dutch nature policy
In the above, we have shown how changes in discourses about nature conservation in the Netherlands became incorporated and stabilized into institutional arrangements. However, we also showed that such institutionalization is not self-evident. This holds true for the two discursive-institutional shifts in the last 25 years in the Netherlands: the rise of the conservation/development discourse in the 1980s/1990s and the rise of the critical discourse(s) in the 2000s/2010s. In the 1990s, the
Discursive institutionalism
In this paper we have used a discursive institutionalist approach to understand both stability and change in Dutch nature conservation policy over the last 30 years. Discursive institutionalism explicitly focuses on abrupt institutional changes and the role which new or emerging counter ideas play. This is exactly what we have witnessed in Dutch policy since 2010. The analytical dualism between institutions and discourses on which the approach is based – and the idea of a longitudinal
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