We need to talk about ELMS: what Pressman and Wildavsky can tell us about English agri-environmental policy in 2023

Its fifty years this year since Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) made the major contribution to policy implementation studies of the phenomena whereby policy objectives (in Washington) misaligned with policy outcomes (in Oakland). Their book helped coin the term ‘policy implementation gap’. An idea that policy science scholars have since gone on to debate and theorise with ever-increasing waves of sophistication and nuance - through managerialism and behavioural public policy, the sub-discipline has come to understand how and where policymakers can 'mind the gap' between objectives and outcomes. The ‘politics of policy’ have added new dimensions and considerations to implementation studies – and in England's environmental policy sphere, the politics of policymaking and policy implementation mean that new implementation gaps are becoming apparent. Just like Pressman and Wildavsky found when looking at urban employment programmes made in the clean rooms of Washington implemented on the mean streets (at the time) of Oakland; ambitious-sounding and forward-looking post-Brexit environmental policy made in Westminster is failing to translate to outcomes for nature in Devon, Northumbria, or Leicestershire. The results of this implementation gap are stark and everywhere. From the sewage pumping daily into our rivers and beaches to the quality of urban air scapes – the evidence of implementation gaps abound. Sure, some argue that 'better policy' is the answer. Though much like the findings of Pressman and Wildavsky the answer is rarely about 'better policy', but about deficits in the policy implementation process.

England in 2023 isn't California in the 1970s – and the UK environmental policy landscape is a more complex and mature system of policy instruments and governance actors and mechanisms to support and manifest the intentions of policymakers. That said, I argue that the challenge we face in 2023 is a familiar one to what Pressman and Wildavsky found. This is that policy implementers are starved of funds and overworked to the point that out of desperation they will find ways to deliver perfunctory policy implementation but cannot deliver the ultimate outcomes envisaged by policymakers. This is in part a function of the myth that policy implementation is simply a managerial concern, and that the work of policy implementation can be done 'on the cheap'. Across the UK the decade+ austerity agenda ushered in the coalition Cameron-led government of 2010-2015 led to substantial impacts on the agencies of environmental policy implementation and governance. Austerity continues to this day – with departmental spending on grant-in-aid for environmental policy implementation agencies still well below where it was in 2010. And that's before we even factor in an 31% erosion in spending power under 12 years of (CPI calculated) inflation. These agencies which are the point of the spear for implementing the rightly ambitious and forward-looking policy programmes we need in the fight against the climate and nature crises are on their knees just at the moment we are expecting them to do more. It's no wonder that UK biodiversity and nature continue to freefall. These outcomes will only get worse until we grip the fundamental and essential requirement to fund and support policy implementers as they need and deserve.

This brings us to the recently launched Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) which takes over from the problematic Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The team of passionate, inventive and dedicated policymakers at the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have done an amazing job of designing a world-leading replacement for CAP despite the political delay, changing goalposts, fending off multiple vested special interests seeking to dilute and water it down. ELMS is truly a break from the past and promises one of the most globally ambitious policy agendas for paying farmers and landowners/stewards public funds for delivering public environmental goods – if it is well implemented.

Certainly, the policy objectives of ELMS (established in the 25-year environment plan amongst others) are ambitious and laudable. But the elephant in the room is the shameful state of our policy implementation bodies and agencies which have been systematically defunded and degraded throughout the ongoing public sector austerity programme. Indeed, the monitoring, evaluation, compliance and enforcement actions associated with ELMS are going to fall on already hard pressed and exhausted agencies reeling from over a decade of substantial defunding.

And whilst the UK is full of ambitious good-faith farmers and landowners keen to re-nature their land congruent with the aims and objectives of ELMS; there will be many other free-riders and bad-faith actors who will take advantage of the gaps in policy implementation capacities to jeopardise the potential gains for nature that ELMS promises. 50 years on if Pressman and Wildavsky have taught us anything, it's that ignoring the conditions for effective policy implementation means we are headed for a major dysfunction between the policy objectives of ELMS and the policy outcomes for nature, ecosystems, food, and farming.

The UK in 2023 isn't California in the 1970s. And ELMS is not a US urban employment programme. Though the lessons still hold and have an impact today. Policy objectives don't always align with outcomes – but one way to close the implementation gap is to ensure that the implementers of policy have the resources and staff to be able to do so.

Nick is a Lecturer in Public Policy and Administration at the University of Exeter and a former board member of the PSA Early career Network.

He conducts research into environmental governance with a particular interest in how the state, voluntary organisations and public agencies engage with and contribute towards environmental good governance. His research tends towards being more applied and he works closely with environmental public agencies and public sector workers across the UK and Europe.