The Environment and Planning Act (EPA) is a major legislative policy with the intent to revise the Dutch spatial planning system through decentralisation. However, before its introduction date in January 2024, its implementation had encountered several challenges, including delays, rising media attention, and political tensions. With the politicised climate surrounding EPA, the thesis investigates how politics influences the implementation of EPA.

The study employs a discourse analysis approach, a means to studying public discourse where policy actors engage in discourse within the public sphere to convey their ideas about a given policy to the general public. The main discursive unit is the storyline, which is a shared interpretation of the policy employed by actors in their public claims.
Hence, the overarching research question is as follows:

What does the public discourse surrounding the Environment and Planning Act (EPA) in the Netherlands reveal about its policy implementation?

Data was collected from the public discourse surrounding EPA between its legislative inception in 2011 and its formal introduction in 2024. Four prominent Dutch newspapers—NRC, De Volkskrant, Friesch Dagblad, and Leidsch Dagblad—served as data sources.
The research utilises the Discourse Network Analysis methodology, which combines various content and network analyses to reveal changing descriptive and structured patterns of the public discourse.

First, the content analysis is used to characterise the nature of public discourse and identify critical factors that influence policy implementation. Second, the analysis of the actor and storyline congruence network captures coalition structures and the discursive context, respectively; it is used to explain how and why the public discourse evolves with respect to key events in media and the policy process. Third, a “meso-level” network analysis of actor’s positions within the actor congruence network is used to describe their responses to the shifting public discourse through changes in positions within the network.

Three key findings that correspond to the three analyses are obtained. Firstly, public discourse surrounding EPA is characterised as highly disputative, characterised by varying types of disagreements on different policy issues and limitations in cross-actor engagement. Secondly, the study identifies a challenge in balancing the need for policy adjustments with the urgency of implementing them. This struggle can lead to difficulties in integrating ideas from stakeholders into policy formulation and development, which may hinder the overall progress of policy implementation. Lastly, the research suggests how politics is consequential to the policy implementation of EPA. This phenomenon is captured from the defensives of implementers to emerging political pressure on implementation—their original involvement in a broad range of policy issues has shifted to one that primarily defends their responsibilities. It is believed that implementers' critical role in influencing policy from the bottom-up is diminished.

The thesis contributes significantly to understanding policy implementation, highlighting various factors, challenges, and potential threats affecting EPA's implementation. While these findings may not directly aid EPA, they provide valuable guidance when developing similar complex policies in the Netherlands. Policy recommendations were also proposed to identify broad areas of improvement, such as planning the policy process to integrate ideas more effectively and providing more resources to implementers.

Additionally, the research makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating how discourse network analysis can be applied in implementation research. Various extensions and variations are highlighted, which were found to be useful—namely, the novel use of the storyline congruence network to study the changes in the discursive context within a rapidly evolving political process. Future research could explore the potential of discourse network analysis in studying the politics of policy implementation.