A technique provides policy management within a policy-managed environment. A policy management agent retrieves a policy enforcement point (PEP) description from a PEP registry. The policy management agent utilizes the PEP description of the PEP to search a policy library to locate and determine matching (candidate) policies, and the matching policies match the policy description of the PEP. The managed environment, which incorporates policy evaluation, uses the equivalent policy matching criteria as the policy management agent.