Environmental Policy

The Main Phases of Environmental Policy Making

One way to understand environmental policy is to trace its historical evolution. Modern environmental thought dates back to the preindustrial period. Before the 1960s, environmental policy making was primarily geared toward protecting human health from pollution and establishing designated areas of green space for leisure activities. These ends were mainly achieved by limiting pollution from point sources such as factories and establishing protected areas and national parks.

In a second phase broadly encompassing the 1960s and 1970s, environmental policy really took off and environmental pressure groups boomed. It is often said that the first evocative images of the Earth transmitted from deep space in 1968 were what really catalyzed public concern for what became known as “the environment.” The environmental state was born in this period as many jurisdictions created environmental ministries and agencies. However, these responses remained isolated, uncoordinated, and generally reactive. Policies adopted were mainly regulatory in nature, specifying process and emission standards; many were very poorly implemented.

In the 1980s and 1990s, environmental policy entered a third phase. The sector witnessed a huge expansion in the scale of the new environmental states, which sought to address problems in a more preventive manner at source. Old ways of thinking (such as “pollution control”) duly gave way to new ones (“ecological modernization” and “sustainable development”). Rather than promoting end-of-pipe standards, these sought to embed environmental concerns within wider systems of human production and consumption. More specifically, they supplemented “command and control” regulations with new environmental policy instruments such as eco-taxes, voluntary agreements, and product-labeling devices. The new environmental states also began seeking innovative ways to cooperate on addressing cross-border pollution and resource overexploitation. A number of international environmental agreements mushroomed in this phase, and supranational bodies such as the European Union began to assume an ever-greater role in environmental problem solving, as shown by Andrew Jordan (2005).

...