Success and Failure in Environment Policy: The Role of Policy Officials

Abstract

This paper reports on interviews conducted between 2010 and 2013 with senior officials involved in Australian federal environmental policies over the past 30 years. It examines whether they have a prior sense of whether an environment policy is likely to succeed and their experience of the key factors driving environment policy success. Most interviewees claimed a strong prior sense of policy outcomes, but their expression of the key factors indicating success (consultation, clear objectives, a clear mandate, and a strong evidence base) varies from the usual emphases found in the public policy literature. The research illuminates the ways in which the policy officials at times exert a greater role than that suggested by the Westminster conventions or the policy theory literature. Not emphasised in the literature, yet pivotal for success in the vexed space of environmental policy, was the self‐directed yet at times skilful policy ‘agency’ exhibited by officials.

The contentious politics of policy failure: The case of corporate board gender quotas in Spain

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How Government Experts Self-Sabotage: The Language of the Rebuffed

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Trials and tribulations of market responses to climate change: Insight through the transformation of the Australian electricity market

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