Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 38, May 2014, Pages 676-684
Land Use Policy

“The man, the administration and the counter-discourse”: An analysis of the sudden turn in Dutch nature conservation policy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2014.01.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Dutch nature policy has long been institutionalized in a stable “social contract”.

  • Institutionalization both engendered and restricted impact of critical discourses.

  • Recently, many institutions in Dutch nature policy were quickly broken down.

  • Authorative actors successfully used critical discourses to de-institutionalize mainstream policy.

  • Discursive-institutionalism is helpful in analysing radical policy change.

Abstract

The Netherlands were at the forefront of European nature conservation policy until recently. For years, a stable ‘social contract’ around Dutch nature conservation existed. To the surprise of many, this stability suddenly disappeared and Dutch nature policy has taken a dramatic shift with changing discourses on nature conservation, the halting of implementation of several key-policies and budget cuts up to 70%. This paper engages with discursive-institutionalism to understand such abrupt institutional changes through emerging ideas and discourses that reshape and undermine existing institutional arrangements. We show how the institutionalization of policy not only engendered but also restricted the impact of critical discourses in the 1990s and 2000s. However, critical discourses eventually played an important role in the sudden turn in nature conservation policy. The rise of a general populist discourse and the economic crisis contributed to the credibility of critical discourses and their translation into popular frames and storylines. Authoritative actors such as a new State Secretary opened up popular media for the critical discourses and contributed to their resonance among larger audiences. As such, the man and his new administration successfully used already existing counter-discourses to de-legitimise nature policy and break down important institutional arrangements at a pace unseen in Dutch politics. Adding a discursive element to institutionalism provides for analytical tools to understand change from both external as well as internal forces. In turn, enriching discourse theory with insights from neo-institutionalism helps to evaluate which ideas and discourses become materialized in policy and practice.

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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