Mediating the ‘National’ and the ‘Local’ in the Environmental Policy Process: A Case Study of the CPRE

As environmental concerns press upon public policy so state agencies tend to enter into governmental ‘partnerships’ with environmental groups. On the one hand, these ‘partnerships’ allow the state to call upon forms of expertise held by the groups and to gain broad legitimacy for state policies. On the other hand, the development of policy partnerships enables environmental groups to influence policy formulation processes directly. However, it also means that such groups must ‘sell’ the agreed policy line to local members. Using the case study of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), we investigate how environmental groups manage the relationship between national policymaking and local support. Through the investigation of three CPRE county branches we reveal an uneven geography of environmental governance and show how this geography affects the diffusion of environmental policy objectives. We argue that the implementation of environmental policies must be set within local economic, political, and social conditions as these conditions ensure considerable variation in modes of environmental governance.