ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to expose some of the techniques currently favoured for the analysis of policy, especially where concerned with the environment. It discusses some of the characteristics that help to make environmental questions particularly intractable. The chapter attempts to show what useful research has been done in the policy studies area. It draws particularly on Australian experience, highlighting the critical weaknesses of Australian policy-making institutions. The chapter considers the role scientists might play in the policy process. An epistemic community is a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area. Issues exist on which there is intense scientific debate, but which may nonetheless point to a single public policy measure. Environmental problems are particularly susceptible to uncertainty. In the first place, those issues defined as 'environmental' typically derive from human-induced disruptions to ecological processes.
