Scholars of regulation generally view the procedures that agencies must follow when promulgating rules as instruments by which political principals control bureaucratic agents. Much like political principals attempt to use procedural checks to constrain regulatory agencies’ actions, these same...

“Flexible regulation” might sound like an oxymoron but it has become a widely accepted catch phrase for a pragmatic approach to regulation that promises the achievement of important public policy objectives at relatively low cost. Given the growing interest in flexible regulation in recent...

After several decades’ worth of federal and state regulatory intervention, the quality of the environment in the United States is markedly better today that it was at the founding of the modern environmental era. Nevertheless, environmental regulation remains the target of intense criticism,...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established numerous voluntary environmental programs over the last fifteen years, seeking to encourage businesses to make environmental progress beyond what current law requires them to achieve. EPA aims to induce beyond-compliance behavior by...

As much as environmental problems manifest themselves as problems with the natural environment, environmental problems — and their solutions — are ultimately social and behavioral in nature. Just as the natural sciences provide a basis for understanding the need for environmental policy and...

For too long, environmental policymaking has relied on trial and error, without adequate or systematic learning from either the trials or the errors. Systematic program evaluation research has been remarkably scarce relative to the overall number of environmental policies adopted in the United...