“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...

Management-based strategies : an emerging approach to environmental protection / Cary Coglianese and Jennifer Nash -- Environmental management style and corporate environmental performance / Robert A. Kagan -- Evaluating management-based regulation : a valuable tool in the regulatory tool box? /...

Regulators must rely on science to understand problems and predict the consequences of regulatory actions, but science by itself cannot justify public policy decisions. We review the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to justify recent changes to its National Ambient Air Quality Standards...