Innovation Oriented Environmental Regulation

Innovation-oriented environmental regulation is extremely attractive for policy planners and decision makers, since it is expected that innovations can cut costs of environmental measures and overcome existing trade-offs between economic and ecological goals. The central question is, however, how such a regulatory regime of environmental policy approaches should look like. This book provides an excellent overview of the state of research by presenting and discussing theoretical approaches towards a framework of environmental regulation and innovation, international case studies as well as econometric and modelling studies from Europe and the USA.

What role should governments play in protecting the environment and controlling the environmental impacts of industry? Do regulations benefit the environment? And how do they affect industrial innovation? Since the early 1970s, regulations have been used to coerce producers of goods and services into internalizing the environmental costs of production. These efforts have often faced opposition on practical and ideological grounds. Beginning in the 1980s, there has been a movement toward liberalization, coupled with the continued failure of the market to protect the environment as a public good. As a result, private and public sector interests have been debating the appropriate role of governments in protecting and improving the environment and controlling the environmental impact of industry. Using case studies from numerous countries, this book examines political and industrial trends and the responses to these challenges. The authors conclude that the complexities of environmental and economic relationships disallow universal solutions, and they stress the need for context-specific perspectives on the role of regulatory measures in environmental innovation.

This book contains six studies on various national environmental policies and environment -oriented technology policy systems in Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom, sandwiched between this introductory and a concluding chapter. These studies were conducted as part of the ENVINNO research project, "Towards an Integration of Environmental and Ecology-Oriented Technology Policy: Stimulus and Response in Environment Related Innovation Networks", which formed part of the Targeted Social and Economic Research (TSER) Programme of Directorate-General XII of the European Commission, now 1 Directorate-General for Research. We like to thank Mrs. Genevieve Zdrojewski of GD Directorate-General Research for her kind support of our research project. The project was carried out between 1998 and 2001 by research teams from the six countries. The co-ordinating institute was the Department of Environmental Economics and Management at the Vienna University of 2 Economics and Business Administration. At this place we want to mention all researchers involved in the ENVINNO project and we want to thank them all for their contributions to this book and the project and for the good time we have had performing the project and meeting each other at regular intervals in Vienna (A), Enschede (NL), Berlin (D), and Sevilla (E). Department of Environmental Economics and Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration in Austria: • Univ. Prof. Dr. Uwe Schubert, • Mag. Judith Kock, • Mag. Jiirgen Mellitzer, 1 Under contract-number SOEI-CT98-110S. 2 The project website is http://www.wu-wien.ac.atiwwwu/institute/iuwIENVINNO.

Environmental regulation has come of age in recent decades as the blunt methods of command-and-control have been subjected to trenchant criticism from both economists and lawyers in the United States and Europe. As a result of this intellectual development, as well as continuing and increasing severity of environmental problems, there is a need for fresh thinking about regulatory methods that are rational from both economic and legal points of view. This book focuses on the viability of one particular regulatory innovation--the use of agreements or contracts for environmental regulation--as it has been practised in the United States and Europe. The various contributions explore the general idea that certain kinds of environmental problems may best be addressed through contracts among interested parties, including representatives of various levels of government, business, local community and employment representatives, and public interest groups. The parties get together to discuss a particular problem and then agree to an agreement or contract designed to address key issues and interests. At least in some situations, this approach may yield greater flexibility, stronger commitment, and more creative outcomes than traditional command-and-control regulation. Experiments in the use of environmental contracts have begun on both sides of the Atlantic, a fact which makes the comparative study offered here especially timely and valuable.

Here is a dialog among worldwide experts across disciplines concerning theoretical frameworks and practical experiences to guide research and policy "towards environmental innovation systems". The contributors explore new directions of research at the border of two research traditions: systems of innovation and environmental innovations. The text examines the four main components of environmental innovation systems: conceptual foundations, empirical experiences, strategic approaches, and experiences with policy instruments.

This book, originally published in 1995, examines the evolution of environmental policy in 6 OECD countries. Through numerous examples, it contrasts the widely-varying political and regulatory styles and their consequences for innovation. Two industry-specific case studies provide a transnational perspective on the co-evolution of technology and environmental policy. The book concludes that innovation can be successfully harnessed by setting credible, long-term environmental goals and ensuring that regulatory instruments are grounded in flexibility, dialogue and trust.

Winner, 2007 Louis Brownlow Award presented by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and 2006 Best Book in Environmental Management and Policy, American Society for Public Administration. Environmental regulation in the United States has succeeded, to a certain extent, in solving the problems it was designed to address; air, water, and land, are indisputably cleaner and in better condition than they would be without the environmental controls put in place since 1970. But Daniel Fiorino argues in The New Environmental Regulationthat—given recent environmental, economic, and social changes—it is time for a new, more effective model of environmental problem solving. Fiorino provides a comprehensive but concise overview of U.S. environmental regulation—its history, its rationale, and its application—and offers recommendations for a more collaborative, flexible, and performance-based alternative. Traditional environmental regulation was based on the increasingly outdated assumption that environmental protection and business are irreversibly at odds. The new environmental regulation Fiorino describes is based on performance rather than on a narrow definition of compliance and uses such policy instruments as market incentives and performance measurement. It takes into consideration differences in the willingness and capabilities of different firms to meet their environmental obligations, and it encourages innovation by allowing regulated industries, especially the better performers, more flexibility in how they achieve environmental goals. Fiorino points to specific programs—including the 33/50 Program, innovative permitting, and the use of covenants as environmental policy instruments in the Netherlands—that have successfully pioneered these new strategies. By bringing together such a wide range of research and real world examples, Fiorino has created an invaluable resource for practitioners and scholars and an engaging text for environmental policy courses.

Arguing that the performance of industrial environmental regulation is determined by the level and nature of the innovation it stimulates, this text aims to analyze the influence of different structures and styles of implementation on innovation in regulated companies. Further aims include: examining the economic and environmental performance of different forms of innovation developed and applied by industry in response to regulation; describing the conditions under which industrial environmental regulation can be improved; outlining the implementation approaches required for regulated companies to overcome barriers which prevent them from exploiting the economic and environmental potential of particular forms of innovation; demonstrating how technological and organizational change could lead to lower costs and higher benefits from regulatory compliance; and putting forward to governments and industry proposals to improve the relationship between environmental protection and industrial competitiveness.