‘It’s the soft stuff that’s hard’: Investigating the role played by low carbon small- and medium-sized enterprise advisors in sustainability transitions

Significant public funds are invested in low carbon advisors to support small- and medium-sized enterprises to reduce carbon emissions on a regional basis. Little research has been conducted on their experiences and practices, nor their place within the context of local business support policy. Findings draw on interviews with 19 advisors in the UK as well as the author’s four years’ experience as an environmentally focused business support practitioner. Establishing and sustaining engagements with small- and medium-sized enterprises on the topic of pro-environmental behaviours is a multifaceted problem. Advisors typically approach businesses with promises of cost savings rather than using environmental messaging and focus their resources on the provision of building energy audits and technical advice. Advisors rarely engage small- and medium-sized enterprises in values-based discussions or by seeking to understand how and why energy is used in the course of everyday business practices. The paper argues that face-to-face meetings could be better utilised if ‘softer’ skills were deployed alongside technical expertise. It discusses the limitations of growth-focused support in the context of environmental objectives and calls for a shift in the culture of advice-giving, supported by social scientifically informed policy

Environmental Policy and Sustainable Development

With changing and mounting pressures on environmental resources due to economic and demographic developments, environmental policymaking is a wide and continuously growing field. The birth hour of modern environmental policymaking is the 1950s and 1960s, with the United States (US) as a pioneer country in adopting the first instruments for resource protection and combating pollution (Andrews 2006). Around the same time, environmental movements became visible in terms of mobilization and organization (Ruckelshaus 1985), although the origins and philosophical foundations of such movements date back to the fifteenth century (Kline 2011). Similarly, environmental economics, as one of the main instruments of environmental policy analysis, was acknowledged as a scientific field during the 1960s, although the economic analysis of environmental problems had been under way for at least two centuries before (Sandmo 2015). Since these early days of environmental policy, the topics and analysis tools have advanced greatly in order to keep up with new knowledge on environmental issues. The concerns of policymakers and scientists moved beyond resource protection and pollution to cover issues such as resource-use efficiency, problems with common-pool resources, renewable resources, intergenerational equity, and incorporating environmental issues into a wider understanding of sustainable development. Environmental policies were thus transformed from a simply command-and-control perspective toward efficiency-based reforms and later, the more recent issues of integrated approaches toward community and sustainable development (Mazmanian and Kraft 2009). The rise of ecological economics, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, has contributed to an increasing number of tools to address the broad issues of environmental policies. Ecological economics adopted a diversified perspective and broadened the neoclassical approach of environmental economics, leading to pluralism of approaches and policy tools (Venkatachalam 2007). Nowadays, environmental policy is a rich field of investigation and an integral part of public policy. This chapter introduces this field in relation to sustainable development. It outlines the key elements required to define environmental policies and briefly explains the history of issues related to sustainable development. Later, it explains the tools and instruments used as inputs into environmental policies. Finally, it discusses key terms and concepts for analyzing the process, performance, and impacts of environmental policies

Making Sense of the Front Lines: Environmental Inspectors in Ohio and Wisconsin

Although about 90% of environmental policy is delegated to the states for implementation, the individuals responsible for implementing a majority of that policy are largely understudied. Existing acknowledgment of these regulators typically extends only to the regulatory enforcement strategy their agency employs. Missing in these conversations is a focused study on the regulators themselves and their perceptions of the regulated community that they interact with daily. Understanding these perceptions will provide insights into how regulators approach their interactions and how they ensure regulatory compliance. This paper uses an exploratory case study approach to focus on front-line regulators with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources via agency-wide surveys. Findings from the surveys reveal generally positive perceptions of the regulated community in both states and experiences with them. The findings call attention to a neglected population and emphasize the importance of regulators’ perceptions in their regulatory approach