Free riding in voluntary environmental programs: The case of the U.S. EPA WasteWise program

Voluntary Environmental Programs (VPs) involving industry and regulatory agencies have emerged as the promise of the future in environmental policy circles. Although the number of these agreements is increasing in OECD countries, there are still concerns about their effectiveness; in particular that “free-ridingâ€\x9D behavior may be difficult to avoid within VPs. Free riding occurs when one firm benefits from the actions of another without sharing the costs. Free-riding behavior may undermine the credibility of VPs and therefore their viability. Our paper focuses on understanding the factors that favor or hamper free-riding behavior in VPs. Our analysis is based on the case of the WasteWise program that was established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduce municipal solid waste. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005

Greener and cleaner? The signaling accuracy of U.S. voluntary environmental programs

Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) have become a popular alternative to traditional regulation. However, little is known about whether these programs are sending accurate signals about the environmental practices of their participants. As a means for understanding signaling accuracy, this research investigates VEP design characteristics. The findings suggest that there are four distinct types of programs with varying degrees of rigor. Because information for differentiating among program types is limited, less rigorous VEPs can signal that their administrative, environmental performance and conformance requirements are comparable to programs with more robust designs. Further, the lack of monitoring and sanctions in less rigorous programs create opportunities for participants to free-ride and receive benefits without satisfying VEP requirements. Unless some means of distinguishing among program types is implemented, these issues can threaten the long term viability of VEPs as a tool for environmental protection, and the credibility of market mechanisms more broadly. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005

Navigating the dilemmas of climate policy in Europe: evidence from policy evaluation studies

Climate change is widely recognised as a ‘wicked’ policy problem. Agreeing and implementing governance responses is proving extremely difficult. Policy makers in many jurisdictions now emphasise their ambition to govern using the best available evidence. One obvious source of such evidence is the evaluations of the performance of existing policies. But to what extent do these evaluations provide insights into the difficult dilemmas that governors typically encounter? We address this question by reviewing the content of 262 evaluation studies of European climate policies in the light of six kinds of dilemma found in the governance literature. We are interested in what these studies say about the performance of European climate policies and in their capacity to inform evidence-based policy-making. We find that the evaluations do arrive at common findings: that climate change is framed as a problem of market and/or state failure; that voluntary measures tend to be ineffective; that market-based instruments tend to be regressive; that EU-level policies have driven climate policies in the latecomer EU Member States; and that lack of monitoring and weak enforcement are major obstacles to effective policy implementation. However, we also conclude that the evidence base these studies represent is surprisingly weak for such a high profile area. There is too little systematic climate policy evaluation work in the EU to support systematic evidence-based policy making. This reduces the scope for sound policy making in the short run and is a constraint to policy learning in the longer term

Global Corporate Social Responsibility, Human Rights, and the Law: An Interactive Regulatory Perspective on the Voluntary-Mandatory Dichotomy

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been customarily seen as an inherently voluntary corporate endeavour that inhabits the area stretching ‘beyond compliance’ with law. However a growing number of writers and practitioners deem this understanding of CSR inaccurate and unproductive. In this article CSR as ‘beyond compliance’ is questioned from logical, descriptive and normative points of view; once freed from its conceptual straitjacket, CSR research is encouraged to look deeply into the mutual interaction between corporate voluntarism, or CSR, and law. The argument here is that the keyword in regulating CSR is not voluntarism that is naturally pitted against hard law, but discretion; regulating CSR is not about replacing voluntarism with hard law, but about guiding discretion through law which neither overrides it nor leaves it untouched. Leading companies, through their early failures, persistence and learning from mistakes adopt now more participatory approaches to implementing CSR and as a result may generate systemic effects on governance. The milestone in the development of CSR is stakeholders’ participation. A more careful analysis of the mandatory-voluntary controversy does justice to a complex phenomenon (CSR) that is not only a commendable managerial practice but also a significant protection mechanism relevant from a public policy perspective. The focus of the analysis herein is on ‘international’ or ‘global’ CSR, more specifically on that part of CSR that concerns the role of MNEs regarding human rights in developing countries