ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the extent to which, under the Conservatives, the rhetoric of sustainable development penetrated different levels of government and aims to evaluate their machinery of government reforms and identifies various constraints on the enthusiastic acceptance of sustainability within the British policy elite. The Conservative government was formally committed to the principle of sustainable development from June 1988 when Mrs Thatcher endorsed the concept in the Toronto G7 summit’s response to the Brundtland Report. By mid-1990s, the UK government had formally in place a national strategy for achieving sustainability. Within government both politicians and bureaucrats have been remarkably slow in learning the new rhetoric of sustainable development. It is not surprising that politicians have rarely modified their language to a more ‘politically correct’ ecological discourse. It is at level of local government that debate on implementing sustainable development proved most vigorous. In part, this can be explained by the rather ambivalent ‘hands-off approach of central government towards local government.
