Abstract: Environmental policy making and its implementation has in the main suffered from a lack of credible review and evaluation. This has resulted in a generally poor understanding of policy effectiveness, or success, especially in terms of outcomes achieved and their linkages to the policies that underpin them.

This can be attributed in part to the lack of informed policy ‘learning’ from one corresponding policy to the next. This lack of ‘closing the policy’ loop has a raft of implications for environmental policy-making and its effectiveness. Future policy and decision-makers have little understanding whether previous decisions their on-ground implementation or outcomes which may have occurred have been achieved by sound policy or a far more ad hoc policy approach. Similarly, stakeholders cannot be assured either that resource allocations are linked to sound policy deliberation and or that specific monitoring or data collection programs are as deficient in scientific ‘continuity’ as they are in usefully informing or guiding policy-related outcomes.

Without such a review and evaluation process to close the policy ‘loop’ it could be argued that a significant disconnect exists between the success of environmental policy formulation and its effective implementation.

This paper provides the preliminary exploration of this theory utilising the capacity of state of the environment reporting practice as a policy review and evaluation tool. The take-up of state of the environment reporting findings into subsequent policy-making is examined and discussed within theoretical frameworks including organisational learning theory as a means of explaining the apparent disconnect between state of the environment reporting and improving future environmental policy outcomes.

This paper forms the basis of the author’s preliminary PhD research entitled, Finding the ‘elegant connect’ between environmental policy and state of the environment reporting. Further data and research will be obtained from state of the environment practitioners, their respective SoE reports and a sample of policy-makers intended to utilise the findings of these reports. Further findings of this will be published as this PhD progresses.