ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
Chapter 11 assessed progress towards sustainable development by examin-
ing various ways in which governments have tried to build environmental
considerations into the policymaking process. Another aspect of judging
progress towards sustainable development is to examine the policy outputs
that emerge from that process. A key element in the policymaking and
implementation process concerns the choice of policy instrument, or levers,
bywhich a government tries to achieve its policy objectives. Policy instru-
ments should be enforceable, effective and educative: they should change
thebehaviour of target groups, achieve the stated policy objectives and help
spread environmental values throughout society.
It is conventional to distinguish four broad types of policy instrument
available for a government to use in pursuing its environmental objectives:
regulation, voluntary action, government expenditure and market-based
instruments (MBIs).^1 Adistinguishing characteristic of the traditional envi-
ronmental policy paradigm was its reliance on regulatory, or ‘command and
control’, instruments. During the 1970s and 1980s, new environmental leg-
islation created an extensive regulatory framework in most countries, but
as many environmental problems continued to worsen despite this grow-
ing regulatory ‘burden’, the use of regulation was increasingly criticised,
particularly by economists, industrialists and right-wing politicians. Conse-
quently, there has been growing support for MBIs as a more efficient and
effective alternative to regulations. Ecological modernisation in particular
is underpinned by an explicit assumption that it is the market that will
deliver sustainability, so a growing interest in MBIs may be one indicator
of a general shift away from the traditional paradigm towards ecological
modernisation.
Acentral argument of this chapter is that the choice of policy instrument
is only partly a technical matter of selecting the instrument that offers the
most efficient or effective means of delivering policy objectives. It is also a
highlypoliticalprocess in which decisions are shaped by competing interests.
Policy instruments are intended to alter the behaviour of producers and/or
consumers, so it is hardly surprising that affected interests will mobilise
resources to influence those choices. Indeed, political considerations have
informed the way the ‘command and control versus MBI’ debate is often
stylised as a choice between two sharply contrasting approaches when, in
practice, the differences are not so clear-cut.
The first part of this chapter analyses the strengths and weaknesses of
different policy instruments, concentrating on the central debate between
regulation and MBIs. It also identifies some important contextual features
which influence their implementation, such as variation in national regu-
latory styles. The second part provides a broad overview of climate change
strategiesin the energy and transport sectors – probably the most pressing
and perplexing policy arena for contemporary policymakers – to illustrate
some of the issues raised earlier in the chapter.