Voluntary Approaches in Environmental Policy

François Lévêque is professor of Law and Economics at the Ecole des mines de Paris. His academic, teaching and consulting interests are in the areas of environmental policy, antitrust and regulation. His research focuses on the assessment of policy instruments (e.g., access charges for railways, transmission tariffs, eco-taxes, co-venants) and policy reforms (e.g., gas and electricity French and European laws, EU deregulation in railways and airlines industries).

• 1. Introduction: The rationale and potential of voluntary approaches.- 2. Externalities, collective goods and the requirement of a state’s intervention in pollution abatement.- 3. Environmental regulation through voluntary agreements.- 4. Voluntary agreements in environmental policy: negotiating emission reductions.- 5. The cost efficiency of voluntary agreements for regulating industrial pollution: a Coasean approach.- 6. Can Austrian economics provide a new approach to environmental policy?.- 7. Voluntary approaches to environmental protection: the role of legislative threats.- 8. Environmental industrial regulation and the private codes question.- 9. The influence of information-based initiatives and negotiated environmental agreements on technological change.- 10. A dynamic model of environmental policies. The case of innovation oriented voluntary agreements.- 11. Voluntary agreements with industry.- 12. Voluntary agreements as an instrument to substitute regulating and economic instruments: Lessons from the German voluntary agreements on CO2 reduction.- 13. Voluntary approaches, the environment and the law: a Canadian perspective.

From the reviews: "Carlo Carraro and Francois Leveque's book is one of the first wide-ranging and serious endeavors to delineate voluntary approaches, analyze their effectiveness, explore the possibilities to enhance their performance, and explain the rationale for voluntary compliance by different stakeholders. ... strongly recommend this book to graduate students, environmental policy scholars, policy practitioners, and those in the private sector interested in the adoption of voluntary approaches. The book provides researchers and stakeholders with theoretical and methodological tools for exploring the conditions under which voluntary agreements work." (Lada Kochtcheeva Dunbar, International Environmental Agreements, Vol. 8, 2008)