Journal of Environmental Management (2000) 60, 289–300 doi:10.1006/jema.2000.0385, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on The strategic gap in air-quality management G. Cannibal †* and M. Lemon ‡ The successful management of atmospheric pollution is best achieved when the benefits of controls can be clearly demonstrated to those who the controls affect. There is a need to demonstrate to a population that change will benefit the social and biophysical aspects of that population’s environment as a whole. This paper suggests that policy-makers need to demonstrate clearly the advantages of a change in behaviour for the local environment while concurrently minimising the life-style costs of the people whose co-operation is needed to bring that change about. This requires an improved understanding of the activities affected and the message and media by which environmental benefits can be communicated in the light of that understanding. Using the example of tropospheric ozone, this paper argues that air-quality management requires close regional co-ordination which can facilitate the establishment and implementation of local policy options. The ability of the UK National Air Quality Strategy to achieve this in its present form is discussed and the existence of a strategic gap between the current approach to air-quality management and the major issues surrounding air quality considered.  2000 Academic Press Keywords: ozone, UKNAQS, culture, policy, behaviour. Introduction ‘A strategic gap is a condition of imbalance between where management would like to be with regard to its aspirations, and goals. Its a measure of the perennially imperfect fit between an institution and its external environment’ (Harrison, 1989). The origi- nal United Kingdom National Air Quality Strategy (UKNAQS) described itself as ‘‘a watershed in the history of measures to improve the quality of air in the United King- dom’’ (DoE, 1997). The main stated aim of the act was to bring together the concepts of sus- tainable development and recent advances in the understanding of air pollutants and the methods for tackling them. However, when one looks closely at the strategy and the accompanying 1995 Environment Act, Part IV, which operationalises many of the aims of the strategy it may be seen that this new framework does little more than bring together approaches first developed under Email of corresponding author: g.l.cannibal@derby.ac.uk Ł Corresponding author † School of Environmental and Applied Sciences, University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby, DE23 1GB, UK ‡ INTA/SIMS, University of Cranfield, Cranfield, MK43 AOL, UK Received 21 December 1998; accepted 23 August 2000 the Clean Air Acts; extending the concept of the local authority controlled smoke con- trol areas with those laid out in the 1990 Environmental Protection Act and soon to be implemented Pollution Prevention and Con- trol Act (1999) (both of which are a direct descendants of the Alkali Acts); concerning the technical control of emissions at source, and developments within European legisla- tion on emission and fuel technology, under one roof. The UKNAQS and 1995 Environ- ment Act (EA) can be seen as a modification of past air-quality management frameworks rather than a radical change in approach. The dominant tools for air-quality manage- ment remain; the use of licensing (first adopted under the Alkali Acts, 1863–1874); financial coercion and incentive to change behaviour (from the Clean Air Acts of the 1950s and 1960s) and the technical reduc- tion of motor-car and industrial emissions (Langston, 1990). These are all targeted at the attainment of generically set UK and European ambient air quality standards and as such are essentially oriented towards 0301–4797/00/120289C12 $35.00/0  2000 Academic Press