Some embodiments provide, for a policy framework, a method for managing policies for a set of resources in a computing environment. The method stores several imported policy rules as primitive policies, each of which includes a policy data structure that includes a set of fields. One of the fields of each primitive policy stores the imported policy rule for the primitive policy. The method defines several composite policies based at least in part on the primitive policies. The method stores the defined composite policies as policy data structures. Each policy data structure for a composite policy includes a set of fields and references at least one additional policy data structure.