Environmental Protection And Regulation Research Paper

Environmental policy commonly is defined in terms of the problems it addresses. So if we look at the traditional content of environmental policies, most are associated with controlling pollution, limiting the loss of natural habitats, managing waste such as sewage and litter, and reducing the impact of natural hazards such as flooding (McCormick 1991). These policies normally are put into effect using regulatory tools although recently there has been a pronounced trend towards using nonregulatory tools such as subsidies, eco-taxes, voluntary agreements, and information campaigns. However, environmental policy in the broader sense described above touches upon many more issues than this functional list of issues implies. Indirectly it is related to food and energy production, the transport of goods and services, human health and safety, consumer choices, the survival of biological species, and national and international security in the broadest sense. In short, environmental policy addresses nothing less than the complex, reciprocal links between modern society, the economy, and the environment. In that sense it is probably unique among policy areas in its breadth and complexity (Ingram and Mann 1983). Achieving a harmonious balance between societal, economic, and environmental systems is the main aim of sustainable development, the main organizing concept of contemporary environmental policy.

If ‘the environment’ is amorphous then the term ‘policy’ is equally slippery. A dictionary definition is ‘a course of action or principle adopted or proposed by a government.’ However, some policies comprise a whole series of decisions, layered on top of one another. Policy-making is recursive: policies are put into place to address problems then immediately retuned to fit new political demands. Moreover, policies may be adopted formally by national governments but the detailed aspects of implementation are often left to lower levels of government to determine. Therefore, when a local pollution control officer negotiates with the owner of a polluting factory over the details of site license or emissions permit, they are arguably making policy. Finally, policies also serve a symbolic purpose. Some are only ever statements of intent which governments have no real intention of enacting. Policy, therefore, should be thought of in terms of courses of action and inaction. To summarize, policy is as much an ongoing process of interaction as a discrete product or output of the political system, written down in legal texts.

1. The Characteristics Of Environmental Policy

We can therefore summarize environmental policy as an evolving societal process of addressing the quality of the natural world: hardly a crisp and clear-cut definition! Perhaps the best way to illuminate the concept is to compare the environment with other policy areas such as health, the economy, and crime. According to Weale and Williams (1992), the objective characteristics of a policy area have an important bearing upon the form of politics and policies that develop around it.

1.1 Public ‘Goods’ And ‘Bads’

Environmental quality is a classic example of what economists term a nonexcludable or ‘public’ good. By that they mean that the benefits of environmental quality accrue to most if not all citizens (or, to put it another way, the costs of degradation are borne by society rather than just the polluter). This seemingly self-evident observation has a number of important implications for the scope of environmental policy. First, large parts of the environment—the atmosphere and large areas of the ocean—are common property and nobody can be excluded from using them. This means that while benefits of resource use tend to be concentrated spatially, the costs or ‘externalities’ typically are dispersed across myriad individuals in the form of pollution (or economic ‘bads’). Think of a smoking factory chimney pouring black soot on to the houses surrounding it, for example. In this example the polluter has an economic incentive to carry on consuming clean air in the knowledge that the bads will be born by the whole neighborhood. Second, while the financial cost of improving the environment often falls on one small section of society (e.g., the owner of the factory), the benefits normally are spread widely among myriad of users. This is partly why polluters, who have a strong incentive to unite and fight to protect their right to pollute, have an immediate advantage over those who suffer the disbenefit. The latter are often too widely dispersed or individually suffer too little to mobilize into a coherent group. Third, those fighting for the ‘public’ interest or the welfare of natural entities do not necessarily act automatically to achieve their individual or group self-interests—an observation first made by the political scientist Mancur Olson. He argued that individuals have an incentive to ‘free ride’ by consuming environmental quality in the hope the cost will be born by some other party or society as a whole. For example, polluters of a stream will continue to pollute in the hope that a sufficient number of other users desist from polluting it. However, the public good aspect of environmental problems also conditions attempts made to abate environmental damage. Then, recreational users of our hypothetical river may well calculate that it is easier to free-ride (i.e., wait for someone else to tackle the polluter and share in the benefits of clean water) than do something about it themselves. One of the reasons why motorists continue to drive is that they cannot be excluded easily from the benefits (i.e., less air pollution and congestion) which are generated when some of their number give up their vehicles and turn to public transport.

1.2 The Need For Regulation

Because environmental damage has its origins in otherwise socially legitimate activities like energy and food production, the role of the state is often to police the consumption of public goods by limiting the level of damage that one section of society can impose upon others. Environmental policy is, therefore, inherently regulatory in nature, although regulation inevitably has distributive and redistributive consequences (Lowi 1972). Lowi argued that whereas distributive policies (e.g., welfare programs) produce close, dependent relationships between the state and interest groups, regulatory policies produce more conflictual forms of politics. However, not all interest groups enjoy the same level of influence or political power. Some routinely have more of ‘a say’ than others in determining the content of policy by ‘capturing’ the regulatory process. The precise manner and extent to which the state is captured by sectional groups is disputed hotly among political scientists (Dunleavy and O’Leary 1987). It is abundantly clear, however, that business groups do enjoy a structural advantage over other groups—one that exacerbates the collective action problems suffered by environmental groups. According to Lindblom (1977), the basic fact that all governments, whether Left or Right, need a healthy economy to provide jobs and welfare support, forces them to adopt measures that are in the interests of business without business having to take any observable action. Scientists too have their own independent policy objectives, and can be thought of as an interest group. In some situations ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas 1992) of scientific experts have had a decisive influence on the course of policy by steering decision-makers to their preferred solutions.

1.3 Complexity And Uncertainty

Once human development exceeds the planetary capacity for self-repair, environmental assets can collapse and disappear, never to reappear. Admittedly, some environmental assets and functions are repairable or substitutable (individual trees can be replanted; water can be transported), but many others (a delicate wetland habitat, for example) are not. Irreversibility complicates environmental policy making, differentiating it from other areas such as tax or social affairs where problems can be more easily revisited. Irreversibility implies that piecemeal policy responses should be substituted for ones that foresee problems and address them systematically. In practice, the environment often responds slowly and subtly to human interventions, and ‘local’ problems are sometimes only the observable tip of much more complicated and spatially dispersed set of processes. For instance, the pressure to pollute a local river with pesticides and fertilisers may stem from a national policy to intensify agricultural production in order to compete in world markets. The ‘international’ agricultural policy and the ‘local’ pollution policy are interconnected and should be developed as such. However, in practice it is often extremely difficult to trace the connections between and within particular spatial levels and sectors, leading to compartmentalized policy making. This raises the question of how decisions should be made at one level when the entire sequence of consequences for other levels or sectors cannot be predicted. Should decision-makers err on the side of caution or proceed in the hope that unfavorable consequences will not arise? This is one of the reasons why the precautionary principle—the idea that policy makers should go ‘beyond science’ to address potential problems when the threat of harm is significant and potentially irreversible—has become such an important issue of policy debate in areas such as genetically modified food and endocrine-disrupting chemicals (Jordan and O’Riordan 1999). But, whenever the state of the environment cannot be determined precisely before or after a decision is made, the scene is set for those with vested interests to twist scientific ignorance to suit their own cause. Political systems find it difficult to cope with genuine uncertainty in policy making. This is why difficult environmental policy decisions routinely are handed to committees of experts to deliberate upon, delaying still further the adoption of protective measures.

1.4 Time And Space

We have noted that environmental quality is a classic example of a public good, but the costs and benefits of policy do not necessarily accrue to the same citizens. Consequently issues of equity and justice are central to most, if not all, environmental decisions. More often than not, those who suffer most from environmental damage are the poorest who lack the means to protect themselves, while those who benefit have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The precise spatial and temporal distribution of costs and benefits produces alliances of self-interest which battle to determine the scope and content of environmental policy. The construction of a bypass road around a congested village, for example, will greatly improve the welfare of its residents but at the cost of disruption to those living in the path of the alternative route. Balancing these different needs becomes a central question of politics (or decision-making) which is pervasive in all forms of environmental policy making. Another problem facing policy makers is how to account for the well-being interests of future generations whose needs can only be guessed at. According to the most widely adopted interpretation of sustainable development, policy makers should address the needs of current generations of humans without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. Clearly, this raises very thorny questions of justice and morality, to say nothing of due democratic process.

1.5 Political Borders

Unfortunately for policy makers, environmental problems show scant regard for political borders. Essentially, there are three types of international problem. The first arises when the legitimate activities of one state have international implications (e.g., acid rain and global warming). Then there are global processes such as trade and international debt that have environmental implications. Finally, there is the problem of how to preserve resources such as rainforests and regional seas that reside in one part of the world but are valued by all. Olson’s theory of collective action illuminates the difficulties in achieving cooperation between otherwise sovereign states, especially when action is required from those who can legitimately say they are not to blame. Regional arrangements, such as those pioneered by the European Union, provide the best evidence of successful international diplomacy.

However, many of the disputes about who is responsible for causing and remedying global environmental problems such as global warming change hinge on a North vs. South axis, though not exclusively so. In these circumstances, environmental policy relies upon regimes—international conventions and protocols—to develop the necessary amount of trust between participants. In some circumstances institutional arrangements are put in place to deliver ‘selective incentives’ (Olson 1965) (i.e., technical and financial assistance) to bring reluctant countries on board whose participation is considered vital to the success of the regime (Jordan 1994).

1.6 Environmental Policy Integration

While the environment functions as an integrated whole, the bureaucracies set up to manage it typically are fragmented into different sections in order to avoid administrative overlap and inefficiency (Weale et al. 1991). The mismatch between institutions and environmental problems has been an enduring problem for policy makers since time immemorial. The environment is probably unique in the extent to which it cuts across traditional sectors of government. It is why environmental policy making often produces furious conflicts betwn environmental ministries and the older and often more powerful parts of government representing finance, agriculture, transport, and so on. Thus, one of the great unmet challenges of the 1990s has been to find mechanisms to integrate environmental concerns into all areas of decision-making (Jordan 2000, Weale and Williams 1992). According to the UN (‘Brundtland’) report that did so much in the late 1980s to set the terms of the international debate about sustainable development:

Those responsible for managing natural resources and protecting the environment are institutionally separated from those responsible for managing the economy. The real world of interlocked economic and ecological systems will not change; the policies and institutions concerned must (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987).

In the ‘real world’ of bureaucratic politics described by Brundtland, each department defends its own position while resisting a line that, while potentially beneficial to society as a whole, clashes with its ‘own’ interests. So, even if the environment department wishes to push a greener line, it is likely to come up against fierce opposition from departments representing the interests of farmers, industrialists, or road builders.

1.7 Nonhuman Entities

Environmental policy is probably the only domain of policy that has as its main goal the protection of nonhuman entities. Just about everybody supports some form of environmental protection. But the crucial question is to what extent should moral significance be ascribed to plants and animals, especially if it involves self-sacrifice and higher economic costs? There are essentially two ethical positions in this debate: technocentric and ecocentric. The clash between these value positions, which have remained remarkably resilient in spite of the widespread greening of party politics, policy making, and government throughout since the 1970s, is clearly identifiable in most contemporary environmental disputes. Those who adopt a technocentric view regard nature as a source of resources to be exploited, whereas ecocentrists feel that the nonhuman world has interests and moral significance independent of humans valuation—what economists term ‘existence value.’

While the technocentric view is hierarchical, manipulative, and managerial, the ecocentric view, by contrast, embraces community scale, natural rhythms, and a morality based on ecological principles. Business tends to adopt a more technocentric line, which conditions the general direction of policy via the structural commitments outlined above. The ‘green’ case put by environmentalists is much more ecocentric. If anything, 30 years of environmental debate has led to a convergence of interests towards the center of this continuum of worldviews. To a greater or lesser extent environmentalism has made all industrialized societies much greener. This is reflected in and nourished by the discourse surrounding the term sustainable development which presents environment and development as two sides of the same coin, one being the necessary precondition of the other. Sustainability as defined by the Brundtland report is politically palatable precisely because it carries the comforting message that the world can grow its way out of ecological and geopolitical crisis.

Despite this convergence, contemporary environmental conflicts are still driven by the clash between worldviews. We see this in the current debate about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and foods. The large chemical companies are technocentric in their outlook, stressing the benefits of manipulating natural processes for human benefit. Their faith in the power of science to achieve a transition to modified crops in a predictable and controlled manner sets them apart from environmental groups who stress the fundamental uncertainties involved—uncertainties which, if not respected, may result in disastrous and irreparable damage to natural biodiversity. At the root of the unfolding debate about GMOs is the question of whether humans have the moral right to ‘play God’ with nature. The technocentric has few moral qualms about this, whereas the committed ecocentric does. We miss a great deal if we try interpret environmental policy making solely in terms of the exercise of political power, the clash of institutions, and the development of the law. Beliefs, morals, and ethics make up the ‘glue’ that cements individuals together into interest groups, informing their political positions and policy preferences.

2. The Main Elements Of Environmental Policy

2.1 A Brief History

As policy areas go, environmental policy is relatively youthful, the main planks dating back only as far as the early 1970s. This is not to say that there were no environmental provisions before that time, only that they were relatively fragmented, aimed mainly at securing human health, and developed in a reactive and ad hoc manner. Environmental policy gained its impetus from the great upsurge of public interest in environmental matters that occurred in the late 1960s. Landmark books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Blueprint For Survival by the Ecologist magazine suggested a global crisis was imminent—a message which found a keen and receptive audience in the USA and Western Europe. It is often said that the first evocative images transmitted from space of Earth floating precariously in the inky blackness of deep space, catalyzed and intensified public concern. They emphasized much more clearly than words the finiteness of the planet and did much to encourage a global perspective. It is also undeniably true that the unprecedented magnitude of human induced environmental change throughout the twentieth century had also produced an objective reduction in environmental quality. The European Union’s (EU) environmental division, DG XI, the UK Department of the Environment (DoE), and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) all date from this period, as do the Norwegian and Danish environment ministries (Hanf and Jansen 1998). The policies adopted were mainly regulatory in nature, specifying process and emission standards that had to be met. In those countries with administrative systems that were less well developed, this early period saw the development of basic standards for the main environmental media—air and water—and for waste and noise pollution.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the focus shifted from dealing with the symptoms of environmental damage—pollution, waste, habitat loss—to addressing the underlying causes. The trend towards redesigning institutions and/or ganisations to tackle problems at root is often labeled ‘ecological modernisation’ (Weale 1992). This involves moving from setting end of pipe standards to tackle the social processes that generate the emissions in the place. The shift towards more diffuse and less interventionist policy tools in part reflects political pressure from business for more flexible and economically efficient alternatives to regulation. The ‘new’ tools in the armoury of environmental policy now include:

(a) Ecolabels: these signal the environmental impact of products and processes to purchasers and investors. Eco-auditing and lifecycle assessments help to rate the ecofriendliness of products and processes by measuring their overall environmental impact.

 (b) Ecotax reform: working with the grain of markets, taxes are designed to penalize economic ‘bads’ and, through hypothecation mechanisms, reward ‘goods’ such as labour. For example, in 1997 the UK adopted a tax on the waste deposited in landfills, the revenues from which are diverted to environmental projects and employee taxes.

(c) Environmental assessment: the aim here is to implement the principle of environmental policy integration. The US National Environmental Policy Act (1969) formally required an environmental assessment of individual projects such as a new road. The EU is developing plans to introduce similar provisions much earlier in the decision-making process, via the assessment of overarching policies and programs (strategic environmental assessment).

(d) Integrated product policies: using various devices to ‘green’ the production of goods from their design and production, through to final disposal. A good example is the EU’s packaging waste directive that aims to reduce the overall quantity of waste material. (e) Strict liability regimes: by making developers legally responsible for remedying the damage they cause, such regimes are seen as a means of encouraging a more consistently preventative approach to environmental issues. The European Commission has been trying to develop such a regime since 1993.

2.2 National Policy Styles

When we study the political response to environmentalism, we see that states and supranational organizations have followed slightly different paths reflecting their history and political mandate. By and large, the current allocation of responsibilities respects the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that problems should be addressed at the lowest appropriate administrative level. Thus, global problems are addressed at the global level (i.e., the United Nations), regional problems at the regional level (e.g., the EU), and the rest at the national or subnational level. Environmental pressure groups and scientists have learned to work at all levels, removing environmental policy from the domain of purely state-guided action and placing it in the context of a multilevel system of governance.

In spite of the internationalization of environmental policy making, individual states continue to pursue different approaches, reflecting their individual geographical circumstances, political and constitutional make-up, cultural orientation, and economic conditions (Skou Andersen and Liefferink 1997, Janicke and Weidner 1997). The interaction of these circumstances gives each country a distinct national ‘policy style’ (Richardson 1982) which pre-exists its response to new political issues. The concept of national policy style would seem to contradict Lowi’s basic thesis that the functional characteristics of a problem determine the main aspect of policy. Policy analysts continue to debate which is more important. It is clear, though, that Britain and Germany, two of the largest and most important actors in the EU, have a long history of approaching problems in very different ways (Weale 1992). The British style is highly consensual and reactive, and decisions are made by bargaining between actors in the context of informal rules. Since the 1980s Germany has adopted a more anticipatory approach based on explicit standards and programs which are designed to ‘force’ the development of clean technologies. Different again is the American ‘style.’ It is much more open, conflictual, and rule-bound, reflecting the adversarial nature of the US political system. The importance of the free market in American society partly explains why the USA has gone furthest in experimenting with economic instruments, such as tradable permits (Golub 1998).

Significantly, these national differences also explain why countries perceive the same environmental problem in very different ways. Significantly, the environment ‘out there’ and the policies adopted to protect it are:

themselves … products of the political process. Countries will vary among themselves and over time as to what is considered to be an ‘environmental problem’ as well as with respect to what should be done, and by whom, about it (Hanf and Jansen 1998).

2.3 The Policy Process

The policy process normally is seen as having a series of sequential parts or stages. These are (a) problem emergence, (b) agenda setting, (c) consideration of policy options, (d) decision making, (e) implementation, and (f) evaluation. According to this ‘textbook’ view of policy, the first task facing environmental groups is to get a particular problem on the agenda for discussion and, if possible, consideration by policy makers. Policy makers then select the best course of action based on specialist advice, make the policy, then hand it on to administrators to be implemented. This stage-based view emphasises that policy is a process involving many different parts of the Government. It is also simple and intuitively appealing. But in practice, policy issues are interconnected, policy makers fumble around for solutions in the context of great uncertainty and many internal and external constraints. Often what was done in the past has a determining effect on how new issues are processed.

There is a multitude of different models and theories which try to explain how the machinery of government makes policy (Ham and Hill 1993, Parsons 1995, John 1998), each presenting a slightly different account of how the constituent elements interrelate. Pluralists believe that political power is widely, although by no means evenly, spread throughout society. Although there are very powerful groups in particular policy sectors, no single group is successful continuously or capable of distorting the entire policy process to its advantage. In policy terms, pluralists assume that the agenda-setting process is open and competitive, with the government acting as an honest broker. Once adopted, though, policies must still be steered through the reefs and shoals of the implementation process. Because of the competitiveness of the policy process policy outcomes tend to be unpredictable.

Neopluralists on the other hand argue that business is in a ‘privileged’ position compared to other groups. Instruments like the mass media help to structure environmental politics by removing ‘grand majority’ issues concerning the fundamentals of the political order from the agenda, leaving citizens to debate an endless range of ‘secondary’ concerns (Lindblom 1977). Whereas pluralists assume that grievances are brought fully into the open, neopluralists argue that they are organized out of politics by institutional rules and routines. Policy is made and implemented within fairly small and stable groups of actors (or networks) clustered around particular government departments. According to neopluralists, policy outcomes generally reflect business preferences rather than those of environmental groups, who find it difficult to gain access to decision makers or conclude that the chance of bringing about change is so slim as to be not worth fighting for.

Finally, structuralists (e.g., Marxists) believe that the state is under powerful structural pressure to nurture economic growth regardless of the environmental implications (Benton 1996, Pepper 1996). On this view, the welfare state and most environmental controls are nothing more than a sham, put in place to pacify critics and keep the conflict between economic classes to manageable levels. For Marxists, environmental problems are rooted in the unequal distribution of resources within society. There can be no lasting solution to such problems until the social system is structured more equally. Although longer-term outcomes inevitably reflect the needs of business, there may, however, be limited, short-run concessions to environmental demands.

2.4 What Drives Environmental Policy?

Having defined the policy process and the main tools used, the obvious question is what actually drives it forward? Where do the inputs, or political issues, come from which create the agenda for environmental policy making? The answer partly is conditioned by which of the three models described above is used. These differences notwithstanding, ultimately the source of all green ideas is environmentalism, a broad social movement which emerged in the late 1960s reflecting a growing public demand for a better environment (Doyle and McEachern 1998). Environmentalism, the roots of which stretch far back into the past (Pepper 1996), is reflected in a long-term shift in public opinion towards ‘quality of life’ issues such as peace and tranquillity, and an increasingly active and diverse range of ‘green’ pressure groups. Environmental concern has exhibited a broadly cyclical pattern over time, with particularly pronounced peaks in the late 1960s and late 1980s. Closer scrutiny reveals that these short- term pulses coincided with periods of economic growth and social introspection.

The political scientist, Downs (1972), has produced a simple model that captures these dynamics. He argues that environmental issues evolve slowly in a culture of scientific enquiry and suppression. This is usually a fairly secretive phase during which gloomy prognoses are carefully explored away from the glare of media concern. The second phase in his ‘issue attention cycle’ was one of media attention and anxiety triggered by crises. Since the 1960s, the environmental movement has benefited enormously from a series of symbolic environmental crises from Amoco Cadiz, Seveso, Three Mile Island, to Chernobyl and GMOs.

The third phase is the reactive process in which political institutions rush to cope and adapt. The early 1970s and the period 1989–92 were both marked by important institutional innovations. The respective focal points were the international conferences at Stockholm in 1972 and Rio in 1992 which spawned a suite of international regulatory protocols. In turn these triggered a higher order of public and private awareness, much greater financial investment, and corporate planning. During the fourth phase the costs of protection sink in, and demands grow for regulation to be rolled back to allow enterprise and economic growth. So-called contrarians begin to question the accuracy of the more gloomy environmental claims (North 1995). However, downgrading the importance of environmental protection succeeds only in sowing the seeds of the next crisis, and so the cycle begins again. Significantly, however, political concern has not settled back to the original level, but has oscillated upwards around a steadily rising curve. The radical environmentalist critique has been blunted greatly as governments have adopted tougher and tougher environmental policies. But ratchet-like, the laws and public institutions put in place to protect the environment during each upsurge, have helped to fix environmental values in place, providing a platform for the next burst of policy making.

3. Conclusion

Environmental policy has reached a critical stage in its relatively short life. In the 1970s governments across the world responded to environmentalism by establishing agencies and laws to address specific issues such as oil pollution, acid rain and ozone depletion, as and when they arose. The primary aim of these early innovations was to safeguard human health rather than protect the environment for its own intrinsic value. Policy makers regarded environmental problems as being essentially technical in nature and politically uncontentious; policies were overwhelmingly reactive rather than proactive, and sectoral rather than integrated across policy domains.

But the discourse surrounding environmental issues has begun steadily to metamorphose into one centered on sustainable development. Significantly, sustainable development is not simply development as conventionally understood, ‘greened’ by bolting on cleaner technologies and reducing waste, but a process of human development which simultaneously satisfies social, economic, and environmental goals, within and between different generations across the world. The emerging orthodoxy is that environmental thinking must now be integrated permanently into areas of policy that have traditionally been regarded as ‘nonenvironmental’ such as agriculture, transport, and energy. One of the most important lessons learnt since the 1970s is that the fundamental driving forces of pollution and habitat loss reside in these sectors. Unless and until these forces are addressed at their roots, environmental protection will always be a reactive, piecemeal, and ad hoc activity. Politically speaking, environmental policy integration represents a new and potentially difficult stage in the continuing development of environmental policy, although the idea behind it has been canvassed by environmentalists for decades (Dobson 1990). However, the political stakes are high because by greening other policy areas environmental policy is in effect progressively undermining its own, hard-won independent existence. The irony is that if and when the environment is reflected fully in every aspect of policy making there will be no need for an identifiable ‘environmental’ policy.

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