Interpreting Environmental Policy: A Social Scientific Approach

Abstract

Any discerning participant in the environmental debate very quickly realises that there is more at issue than the question of how to solve environmental problems. There are underlying disagreements over how problems are defined, their degree of seriousness, who is responsible for solving them, and how amenable they are to solution. These disagreements run deep; they are based on different moral principles, different values, different assumptions about how the world operates, and they are found not only at the international level, where cultural diversity is to be expected, but at all levels, within a single society or organization, and within the actions and policies of a single corporate group. The current debate over British environmental policy provides plenty of evidence for this kind of diversity. The Government claims that its concern for the environment is genuine, that it takes seriously the threat of global warming, that it places high priority on the conservation of wildlife and countryside. But many of the Government's policies appear to contradict these claims; the nuclear industry receives government support despite the dangers of toxic waste, important wildlife habitats continue to be destroyed by development, international efforts to tighten environmental controls are resisted. In everyday life we make sense of such apparent contradictions in the same way as we interpret all our actions, by placing them in context; by identifying them as part of a wider complex of strategies, motives, and ideas. One important function of social science is to assist this process of interpretation by identifying the appropriate context, that in which the actions concerned make the most sense. In this paper, I use a model of cultural diversity developed originally within social anthropology, to throw light on some of the apparent inconsistencies within current British environmental policy.