Environmental policies have traditionally relied on direct controls and on government investment to protect natural resources. Today, the drawbacks and impediments to this approach are evident: heavy burdens borne by companies and the community, complex regulations, a danger of legislative inflation, difficulties in meeting the goals set, to name a few. In response, the environmental authorities in many countries have begun to reassess the efficacy of their programs, with the result that market incentives and voluntary agreements with companies or branches of industry have been added to the arsenal of traditional environmental protection measures. There are great expectations for new economic instruments, which offer the twofold advantage of giving companies more freedom in the choice of means, and of increasing the chances for meeting goals in a more cost-effective way. The authors of this book analyse these instruments - green taxes, tradeable permits, covenants, joint implementation, internationally tradeable quotas - from the point of view of costeffectiveness, their ability to achieve environmental goals, and public and corporate acceptability. They endeavour to determine on the basis of experience to date, whether these instruments are living up to the hopes placed in them.

Publisher description

Market-based Approaches to Environmental Regulation reviews the economics literature of market-based environmental regulations and design issues for environmental taxes and cap-and-trade systems. It begins by reviewing the economics literature on the theory of market-based environmental regulations. It then goes on to cover design issues for environmental taxes and cap-and-trade systems. Market-based Approaches to Environmental Regulation also discusses the U.S. experience with a number of regulatory approaches that are commonly characterized as market-based and describes the mix of market and non-market instruments that characterize these policies. Market-based Approaches to Environmental Regulation will be of interest to all researchers and practitioners in the field of environmental regulation.

Pollution Under Environmental Regulation in Energy Markets provides a study of environmental regulation when energy markets are imperfectly competitive. This theoretical treatment focuses on three relevant cases of energy markets. First, the residential space heating sector where hybrid regulation such as taxation and emissions trading together are possible. Second, the electricity market where transactions are organized in the form of multi-period auctions. Third, namely natural gas (input) and electricity (output) markets where there is combined imperfect competition in vertical related energy markets. The development of free or low carbon technologies supported by energy policies, aiming at increasing security of supply, is also explored whilst considering competition policies that reduce market power in energy markets thus improving market efficiency. Pollution Under Environmental Regulation in Energy Markets discusses the key issues of whether imperfect competition can lessen the ability of environmental policy to reduce pollution and/or to minimize the cost of meeting environmental targets. Policymakers, analysts and researchers gain a thorough understanding of the performance of environmental policy from Pollution Under Environmental Regulation in Energy Markets leading to better design of simulation models of performance and costs of environmental regulation.

This book examines the obstacles to achieving environmental justice in the context of neo-liberal economic systems founded upon deregulation, privatization and the use of market mechanisms as a policy tool. The book explores definitions and policy dimensions of environmental justice and market mechanisms. For some, environmental justice, social justice and ecological sustainability represent the new yardstick against which all concepts of environmental law and policy are to be measured. For others, the market economy, whether free or regulated, marks the starting-point for any strategy of environmental protection. This book is the first to investigate the link between these two approaches, measuring market-based tools of environmental law such as tradable permits and ecotaxes against the requirements of environmental justice. Based on papers delivered at a major international conference held in March 1998, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, the book outlines the global context of the tensions between environmental justice and market-based instruments, focusing on the issue of international trade liberalization. It reports on experiences in a range of countries and regions: the United States, the European Union, Central and Eastern Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Despite the variety of approaches and experiences, all the countries have been trying to adjust their environmental policies to the challenges of deregulation on the one hand and environmental justice on the other. The book concludes with a call to transcend the dichotomy between regulation and the market, and suggests it might be more realistic to perceive environmental policy as a `new deal', a combined effort of the state and the market in which environmental justice provides the overall normative framework.

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.