EDOARDOCROCI IEFE - Università Bocconi, Milano, Italy Voluntary approaches in environmental policy represent a third wave of regulation in the environmental field. Command and control was the first wave. Its core is based on uniform emission standards, the respect of which needs to be enforced through extensive monitoring and severe sanctions. The expected cost of sanction for non-compliance, calculated as its amount multiplied for the probability to be caught, must be superior to the benefits of non-compliance, in order to let the sanction be effective. As the benefits of non-compliance can vary among firms, sanctions need to be very high in order to be effective. In fact sanctions are ordinary correlated to environmental damage and not to the benefits of non-compliance. But very high sanctions can be difficult to enforce as they appear unfair and can lead to dramatic consequences on firms and workers, up to shut-downs of plants. Ambient standards reduce these problems, but oblige the regulator to know a huge amount of information, regarding the specific contribution of each polluter to the polluted body. Information is difficult to obtain because of asymmetric information and costly to produce because it requires large and skilled regulating and enforcing organizations. Nevertheless complex regulation is the base of any environmental policy framework, as it allows the policy maker to fully exercise its power of composition of various interests in a relatively transparent way. Economic instruments were the second wave.

A comprehensive economic theory of environmental voloutary agreements, which takes into account the variety of forms and application situations characterizing this environmental policy instrument Provides common methodologies, implementation rules and evalutation criteria for researchers, policy makers and business operators in the use of environmental voluntary agreements

Inhalt
Voluntary Agreements in Environmental Policy.- The Economics of Environmental Voluntary Agreements.- Corporate Self-Regulation and Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue.- The Poltical Economy of Voluntary Agreements.- Voluntary Agreements in a Rent-Seeking Environment.- Aspects of the Political Economy of Environmental Voluntary Agreements.- The European and the American Approach to Environmental Voluntary Agreements.- The Evolution of Environmental Agreements at the Level of the European Union.- The Use of Voluntary Approaches for Environmental Policymaking in the U.S..- Negotiated Regulation, Implementation and Compliance in the United States.- Design, Negotiation and Implementation of Environmental Voluntary Agreements: National and Sector Approaches.- Efficiency Standards versus Negotiated Agreements in the European Electrical Appliance Sector.- Implementing the Duty of Acceptance in Flemish Waste Policy.- Environmental Voluntary Agreements in Portugal.- Designing Energy Conservation Voluntary Agreements for the Industrial Sector in China: Experience from a Pilot Project with Two Steel Mills in Shandong Province.- Evaluation of Environmental Voluntary Agreements.- On the Assesment of Environmental Voluntary Agreements in Europe.- Environmental Voluntary Agreements in the Dutch Context.- Analysing the Effectiveness of an Environmental Voluntary Agreement: The Case of the Australian National Packaging Covenant.- Towards an Integrated Performance Indicator for (Energy) Benchmarking Covenants with Industry.- Environmental Voluntary Agreements in Policy Mixes.- Environmental Agreements Used in Combination with Other Policy Instruments.- Using the Benchmarking Covenant for Allocating Emission Allowances: Are We Still Moving Ahead?.