Implementation of instruments for sustainable development

1 For his stimulating and constructive comments on an earlier version of parts of this paper I thank Laurence J. O'Toole, jr. This version contains mostly unedited text. So I apologize in advance to the reader for any bad or confusing English. In May 2000, the city of Enschede got the sort of worldwide attention one is all but longing for when a fireworks trade center blew up an entire district. The blast was causing an incredibly small, but nevertheless sorrowful death toll of 21, injuring more than a thousand people, giving tens of thousand people the shock of their lifetime, when pressure waves shivered glass windows all over the crowded Saturday afternoon city center. In one blew it destroyed a few hundred houses and dozens of companies, leaving thousands of other houses lightly to severely damaged. National media response has been very much to look for scapegoats. But a more apt shortcut in explaining what happened would be to state that basically policy implementers messed up the Dutch consensual style of policy formulation by applying it without enough adaptation to policy implementation and even enforcement, or: to what should have been enforcement. In policy sciences, during the last decade the division between policy making and policy implementation has lost much of its emphasis. Probably too much. Also Dutch environmental policy studies research and publications concentrated more and more on innovative ways of joint ('interactive') ways of policy making with target populations. It almost seemed like the lesson from the empirical studies of the seventies and eighties had been forgotten, that showed implementation as often the real bottle neck for policy's capacity to successfully bring about societal change. 'Political will' and 'target group commitment' seemed to have taken their place. Implementation studies seemed to have left the stage. Nevertheless, in a recent article O'Toole (2000) states that while clearly less policy research fares under the flag of implementation studies, many research lines constitute important promises for a better understanding of implementation processes. One of it is the so-called " Instrumentation Theory ". It developed theoretically from a type of process analysis formulated and used in my dissertation (Bressers 1983) and empirically from a series of meta-evaluations on Dutch environmental policies. This was started by a report by Bressers a/o. developed a second version of the theory. It is labeled " Instrumentation Theory " because it was initially developed to enable …