A Policy Monitoring Concept for Promoting the Conservation of Biodiversity (2001)

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, the natural and social sciences, environmental administrations and statistics offices in many European countries have been trying to record “policy” in addition to the traditional data on the state of the environment and changing socio-economic and socio-cultural factors. Up to now, efforts to document political-administrative decisions as definitive dimensions for changes in environmental quality in a sufficiently operational form and in this way relate them to environmental data have not had much success. This contribution argues that the reason for these difficulties lies in the previous lack of co-operation between environmental monitoring and traditional policy evaluation. It presents a concept, which has been tested in practice and links the dimensions of traditional scientific environmental monitoring with those of policy analysis. Hence it enables the documentation of “policy” in spatial and temporal terms with the help of a geographical information system (GIS) which means it can be used as an operational explicative dimension in the natural environment.

German version in: Zeitschrift für Umweltpolitik und Umweltrecht, 2001, no 1: 21–60. Copyright: We thank the editor for authorizing the publication of this article in this book.