Environmental Economics and Environmental Policy Instruments: Introduction and Overview

Abstract

Once the decision to promote environmental quality and sustainable resource use was made, policy-makers began looking for tools or instruments with which to achieve their objectives. This process has gone on, albeit in piecemeal fashion, since at least the late 60s. In the new phase of environmental policy that came about as a result of the report of the World Commission for Environment and Development, Our Common Future (WCED, 1987), an increased emphasis has been put on the application of so-called economic instruments. They represent potentially effective as well as efficient incentives to economic agents to modify their behavioural patterns in environmentally friendlier directions. In fact, the title of this section is a direct quote from the WCED report, and it may be appropriate to demarcate the position of this book within environmental economics and even within the wider setting of environmentalism by sketching the contours of WCED’s analysis.