Rethinking Environmental Policy

Abstract

After twenty years of institutionalised environmental policy, the FRG had come to conceive of itself — together with Japan and some smaller countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland — as in the vanguard of environmental policy in Europe. Indeed, following the occurrence of widespread forest damage and other conspicuous episodes of environmental damage, such as the nuclear incident at Chernobyl, the chemicals accident at Basle and algae pollution in the North Sea, environmental politics in West Germany in the 1980s underwent profound changes. Public pressures, in particular the emergence of the Green Party as a factor in politics, forced all established parties to accord environmental issues more weight in their programmes and their policies (Weidner, 1989, 16–27; Paterson, 1989, 271–88).