Voluntary Environmental Programs: A Symposium

Abstract

Policy scholars, for at least a generation now, have addressed the usefulness of public-mandated “command and control” environmental regulations as an efficacious means to promote a cleaner environment. In the United States, these policies go back at least as far as the CleanAir Act of the late 1960s and are quite often designed, evaluated, and generally shepherded under the auspices of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Given a series of mixed evaluations (for a recent review, see Coglianese & Nash, 2006; Prakash & Potoski, 2006) as to their overall effectiveness, the concept of a Voluntary Environmental Program (VEP) was posed as an alternative to the extensive governmental rules and regulations mandated by “command and control” legislation. In general terms, VEPs are self-regulation agreements that can be promoted by firms, governments, industry associations, and/or environmental groups to compel businesses to enhance their environmental protection performance (Steelman & Rivera, 2006). The idea underlying the voluntary programs concept was consonant with a widespread changing, deregulatory philosophy of government, and was reflected in a number of policy issue-areas, e.g., communications and transportation. However, it was in the area of environmental regulation where Voluntary Programs were most noted, especially under the sponsorship of the EPA (see the Green Lights—later incorporated into Energy Star—and the 33/50 programs). Still, it is important to recognize that the emergence of VEPs was more than just a public policy, as various industries similarly established their own set of VEPs, often in cooperation with and assistance of a government agency; for instance, the American Chemical Council created the Responsible Care Program and the National Association of Ski Areas created a Sustainable Slopes Program (see King & Lenox, 2000; Rivera, deLeon, & Koebler, 2006, respectively). Scholars investigating the VEP phenomenon have observed that there are a number of reasons for firms or industry to adopt VEPs, like as a way of reaching out to consumers with a green signal (thus abetting their comparative differentiation advantage), as a way of obtaining new technologies and information, or as a way of avoiding later, possibly more constraining and invasive government-imposed regulations. VEP scholars, not surprisingly, soon offered a small but growing number of VEP-specific evaluations, finding (again not surprisThe Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2007