Environmental policy has intensively focused on information-based instruments that seek to change agents' behaviour through information provision. This information provision is generally considered as likely to ultimately improve environmental quality. We suggest a new and complementary way to...

Environmental policy has intensively focused on information-based instruments that seek to change agents' behaviour through information provision. This information provision is generally considered as likely to ultimately improve environmental quality. We suggest a new and complementary way to...

The EU recently emphasised the need to speed up the pace of reforms to improve the state of the environment both in Europe and internationally. This becomes in particular challenging, as the "Lisbon Strategy" defines the general goal of an annual economic growth rate of 3%. Decoupling of...

Most concepts of environmental policy do not consider adequately the complexity of nature and society. While neoclassical economics seems to fall into the trap of steering illusion, evolutionary economic concepts that consider societal complexity are too optimistic about the favours of...

Obstacles to clean technology development, innovation and diffusion are not only related to the lack of internalisation of environmental externalities in production costs, as defended by traditional environmental economics. Empirical studies show that many other obstacles prevent these...

In this paper, I discuss, from a policy perspective, the relation between environmental institutions and transaction costs. I stress the importance of environmental institutions in providing decisive information, i.e. information that induces changes in behaviour, and thereby facilitates...

A sustainable economy requires a change in the current path of economic development. The political and societal task is a transition to a new path consisting of more environmentally friendly technologies, products and consumption patterns. Environmentally beneficial technological innovations are...

Although the need for new systems of production and consumption is constantly stressed in policy discussions, the sustainable consumption concept has not been largely translated into practice. The efforts of environmental policy makers to pay more attention to the consumption side are still...

Sustainable development, on a local level, requires incentives whose comprehension and identification depend on various stakes and the involvement of socio-economic actors. The complexity of the task could not be compounded without the aid of modern decision-methods such as Multi-Criteria...