The co-evolution of policy realities and environmental liabilities: Analysing the ontological work of policy documents

•Policy settings are outcomes of ontological work.•The settings become configured in terms of their policy-relevant dimensions.•The outcomes affect how environmental liabilities become defined.•Tools are developed to trace ontological work performed by policy documents.•A study on water management shows how policies became diluted via ontological work. Environmental policies often leave room for case- or region-specific discretion. In this paper, we focus on the transformation of socio-material settings into objects of policy discretion. This move calls for manipulation—ontological work—enabling settings to be connected to policy aspirations. The settings become configured in terms of their professed policy-relevant dimensions. The outcomes affect how environmental liabilities become defined in policy processes. The paper develops a conceptual toolkit to analyse ontological work as it is performed by policy documents. We use the toolkit to analyse three types of policy documents defining how agricultural nutrient loading is to be reduced in the Finnish region of North Savo. The findings show that regulatory decisions and policy recommendations are, to a significant extent, outcomes of ontological work. Environmental liabilities are shaped by the ways ‘unstable junctures’ are brought into being. By these junctures we refer to the points in the configured policy landscapes where choices influential for water protection are, according to the documents, to be made. The documents also generate exclusions that narrow down what liability implies in the unstable junctures. Without a focus on the ontological work and emerging ordering effects, it would have been difficult to show how environmental liabilities became (un)defined in the policy documents. The approach is needed to understand how power is practiced in policy processes and how policy instruments come to have consequences.