Civil servants aren’t meant to do politics. So it was an uncomfortable, queasy occasion this week when Mike Anderson, the environment department’s director general for green economy, had to set out the coalition’s new vision for sustainable development at the close of the Sustainable Development Commission’s big farewell event.

His boss, DEFRA secretary of state Caroline Spelman, had already had some of the SDC’s commissioners in for breakfast that morning. She wanted to explain how the government would drive forward on sustainable development after abolishing the commission, which closes at the end of this month.

Over coffee and croissants she praised the SDC’s previous work and enthused about her new plans… but entirely failed to convince the commissioners. Former SDC chairman Jonathan Porritt (who was not there, but has read the plans – all seven pages) is railing against them.

Later, neither she nor any other DEFRA minister could make it to the SDC’s “Big Sustainability Summit” half a mile from DEFRA’s offices. So Mr Anderson went instead.

Given the decision to cull the SDC, set up ten years ago as the government’s watchdog for sustainable development, the audience of ‘stakeholders’ with long ties to the commission were never likely to warm to this emissary of the executioner.

But his plight was deepened because Jane Davidson, environment minister in the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG), spoke just before him.

Ms Davidson is Labour and has acquired a reputation as something of a green goddess among environmentalists. Her short address was full of praise and thanks for the life of the SDC. Although she is standing down at the May election, she spelt out her plans to leave a Wales-only successor body to the commission.

She never referred directly to the coalition, but her message could not have been plainer. The WAG took sustainable development far more seriously than the Westminster government, and Wales was all the better for this.

The concept and its underlying principles had guided the WAG in deciding how to cut government spending last year. “Short-term decision making is not effective… we use sustainable development as a central organising principle,” she declared. “It gives us a moral compass.”

The man on the Cardiff omnibus might not see it quite that way, but here in London those words made Ms Davidson one tough act to follow. Furthermore, DEFRA’s long-awaited plans for “mainstreaming” and “embedding” sustainable development in government are brief, sketchy and raise several questions, making things even tougher for Mr Anderson.

Knowing his audience was sceptical, he was defensive from the off. “We’re trying to get it right,” he said. “Is it going to work? We think so.”

The coalition’s objective, he said, was to get five million public servants to think differently, making the linkages between economic growth, fairness and long-term environmental protection which would enable society’s development to be sustainable.

He admitted there was still some way to go. But the coalition’s new approach was more promising than what had gone before.

The audience remained entirely unpersuaded. Mrs Davidson bridled when he suggested that WAG was trying to promote sustainable development in a “big government” way. Something has gone wrong when a UK civil servant ends up debating policy with an office-holding politician on a public platform.

The last question of the day from the floor proposed handing policymaking and scrutiny on sustainable development from Whitehall to the WAG. That got a big cheer.

It was not pleasant for the man from the ministry. But he is fairly well paid, and there are can be no shortage of challenges and difficulties in being a senior DEFRA civil servant these days.

On this occasion, though, he was the wrong man in the wrong place. It should have been a DEFRA minister, not a civil servant, on the spot.