Policy-making of early nature conservation. The Netherlands and the United Kingdom compared, 1930-1960

ended

Whereas comparative analyses of the history of nature conservation usually review either the inter-war period or the 1970s, this research action considers the period between 1930 and 1960 as an era in its own right. These decades are of particular interest for the development of ecological ideas and the establishment of long-term institutional arrangements between politics, science, and civil society concerning nature conservation. Another prominent aspect for this comparative analysis is the influence of right extremist political positions. The understanding of conservationist policies as the result of a process of political agenda-setting, discursive backgrounds, and active involvement of experts and civil society organisations, was a successful basis of analysis for the last decades of the 20th century. Here, this approach will be applied to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in the ‘missing’ decades between 1930 and 1960. For each country, a civil society organisation, a state agency and a scientific society and their respective roles in the political agenda-setting process will be scrutinised. The purpose of the project is to identify political and discursive continuities in the policy-making process of early nature conservation. The comparative design of the project, its focus on European countries beyond Germany, and its emphasis on institutional continuity through the Second World War will be important assets for the scientific debate about the early conservationist movement and the reconciliation of ‘green’ politics with its ‘brown’ past.