The Development of Environmental Policy

The environmental policies in place today across the globe have been arrived at through a process of evolution, adoption, and adaptation. This paper outlines how environmental policies have evolved over time, including how their scope has broadened from looking at primarily industrial pollution to addressing a host of other environmental problems, especially in natural resource management. It also examines how the measures that have been adopted by governments to tackle environmental problems have changed, from mainly command-and-control measures to a mix of policy instruments that include self-regulation and market interventions. The paper is the first of a series of eight papers presented in this special issue of the International Review for Environmental Strategies (IRES) which together comprise the report of a recent research project carried out by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and several partner institutes to extract lessons for policymakers from the Good Practices database of IGES’s Research on Innovative and Strategic Policy Options (RISPO). It provides a conceptual background for the report. The last section of the paper provides a brief introduction to the research and describes the structure of the rest of the report.

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International Review for Environmental Strategies: Best Practice on Environmental Policy in Asia and the Pacific
http://pub.iges.or.jp/modules/envirolib/view.php?docid=528