Dirk Bogaert

High Noon in the Low Countries: Recent Nature Policy Dynamics in the Netherlands and in Flanders

This chapter analyses nature policy in the Netherlands and Flanders based on the policy arrangement approach. The institutionalisation of the nature policy area occupies centre stage, and the chapter also looks at the most important adjacent policy areas of spatial planning and agriculture. The analysis deals in the main with national policy as far as the Netherlands is concerned, but as nature policy in federal Belgium has been more or less fully devolved to regional level since the nineteen-eighties, the discussion focuses on the administrative level of Flanders. The start point of the analysis is 1970 and the end point is 2005 for both countries. Although both countries did have a nature policy before 1970, 1970 is generally accepted to be the beginning of a new period of government intervention with environmental issues and nature in northwestern Europe (Bogaert and Leroy, 2004). In particular, the first European Year of Nature Conservation, 1970, acted as a boost to nature conservation policy in several countries in Europe. 1989 is the second key date. This year was a kind of ‘High Noon’ in the institutionalisation of nature policy in both countries, as it was the year in which the first nature policy plans appeared in both the Netherlands and Flanders. The publication of these policy plans coincided with a significant new element in the discourses: more and more advocates at international level for a system of nature reserves based on island theory (Gersie, 1987). It was argued that large nature reserves, possibly subject to different protection regimes, linked together by landscape elements that could function as migration corridors, would considerably increase the viability of wildlife. The creation of such networks would mean the replacement of the defensive strategy of nature protection by an offensive strategy of ‘nature development’. At European level this resulted in the concept of Natura 2000, in the Netherlands it was