Neil Gunningham

A bold and profoundly new way of governing environmental problems is palpable around the globe and aims to overcome the limitations of the interventionist state and its market alternative to offer more effective and legitimate solutions to today's most pressing environmental problems. The 'new environmental governance' (NEG) emphasises a host of novel characteristics including participation, collaboration, deliberation, learning and adaptation and 'new' forms of accountability. While these unique features have generated significant praise from legal and governance scholars, there have been very few systematic evaluations of NEG in practice, and it is still unclear whether NEG will in fact 'work', and if so, when and how. This book offers one of the most rigorous research investigations into cutting edge trends in environmental governance to date. Focusing its inquiry around some of the most central, controversial and/or under researched characteristics of NEG, the book offers fresh insights into the conditions under which we can best achieve successful collaboration, effective learning and adaptation, meaningful participatory and deliberative governance and effective forms of accountability. The book synthesizes its findings to identify seven key pillars of 'good' NEG that are central to its success and will provide useful guidance for policymakers and scholars seeking to apply new governance to a wide range of environmental and non-environmental policy contexts. The book also advances our understanding of State governance and will be a valuable reference for scholars, researchers and students working in law and regulation studies - especially in the field of environmental law.

How much does regulation matter in shaping corporate behavior? This pathbreaking, in-depth study of fourteen pulp manufacturing mills in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand reveals that steadily tightening regulatory standards have been crucial for raising environmental performance. But while all firms have shown improvement, some have improved more than others, many going substantially beyond compliance. What explains the variation in compliance? It's not necessarily the differences in regulation in each country. Rather, variation is accounted for by the complex interaction between tightening regulations and a social license to operate (especially pressures from community and environmental activists), economic constraints, and differences in corporate environmental management style. Shades of Green provides the most extensive and systematic empirical study to date of why firms achieve the levels of environmental performance that they do.

How much does regulation matter in shaping corporate behavior? This pathbreaking, in-depth study of fourteen pulp manufacturing mills in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand reveals that steadily tightening regulatory standards have been crucial for raising environmental performance. But while all firms have shown improvement, some have improved more than others, many going substantially beyond compliance. What explains the variation in compliance? It's not necessarily the differences in regulation in each country. Rather, variation is accounted for by the complex interaction between tightening regulations and a social license to operate (especially pressures from community and environmental activists), economic constraints, and differences in corporate environmental management style. Shades of Green provides the most extensive and systematic empirical study to date of why firms achieve the levels of environmental performance that they do.

Consensus is growing internationally that traditional command-and-control approaches to environmental regulation have borne much of their low-hanging fruit. Yet it is far from clear what should complement or replace them. Regulatory agencies and policy-makers are struggling with a lack of information about regulatory reform, about what works and what doesn't, and about how best to harness the resources of both government and non-government stakeholders. Progress is being impeded unnecessarily by a lack of shared knowledge of how similar agencies elsewhere are meeting similar challenges and by a lack of data on the success or otherwise of existing initiatives. Despite recent and valuable attempts to deal with such problems in the European Union and North America, these remain islands of wisdom in a sea of ignorance. For example, when it comes to dealing with small and medium-sized enterprises, very little is known, and what is known is not effectively distilled and disseminated. Much the same could be said about the roles of third parties, commercial and non-commercial, as surrogate regulators, and more broadly of many current initiatives to reconfigure the regulatory state. Based on the authors' work for the OECD, Victorian Environmental Protection Authority and the Western Australian Department of Environment Protection, Leaders and Laggards addresses these problems by identifying innovative regulatory best practice internationally in a number of specific contexts, evaluating empirically the effectiveness of regulatory reform and providing policy prescriptions that would better enable agencies to fulfil their regulatory missions. Focusing primarily on the differing requirements for both corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises in North America and Europe, the book aims to complement existing initiatives and to expand knowledge of regulatory reform by showing: how existing experience can best be put to practical use "on the ground"; by drawing lessons from experiments in innovative regulation internationally; by reporting and extrapolating on original case studies; and by advancing understanding on which instruments and strategies are likely to be of most value and why. The authors argue that the development of theory has outstripped its application. In essence, Leaders and Laggards aims to ground a myriad of theory on the reinvention of environmental regulation into practice. The book will be essential reading for environmental policy-makers, regulatory and other government officials responsible for policy design and implementation, academics and postgraduate students in environmental management, environmental law and environmental policy, and a more general readership within environmental policy and management studies. It will also be of interest to those in industry, such as environmental managers and corporate strategists, who are considering the use of more innovative environmental and regulatory strategies, and to environmental NGOs.

Consensus is growing internationally that traditional command-and-control approaches to environmental regulation have borne much of their low-hanging fruit. Yet it is far from clear what should complement or replace them. Regulatory agencies and policy-makers are struggling with a lack of information about regulatory reform, about what works and what doesn't, and about how best to harness the resources of both government and non-government stakeholders. Progress is being impeded unnecessarily by a lack of shared knowledge of how similar agencies elsewhere are meeting similar challenges and by a lack of data on the success or otherwise of existing initiatives. Despite recent and valuable attempts to deal with such problems in the European Union and North America, these remain islands of wisdom in a sea of ignorance. For example, when it comes to dealing with small and medium-sized enterprises, very little is known, and what is known is not effectively distilled and disseminated. Much the same could be said about the roles of third parties, commercial and non-commercial, as surrogate regulators, and more broadly of many current initiatives to reconfigure the regulatory state. Based on the authors' work for the OECD, Victorian Environmental Protection Authority and the Western Australian Department of Environment Protection, Leaders and Laggards addresses these problems by identifying innovative regulatory best practice internationally in a number of specific contexts, evaluating empirically the effectiveness of regulatory reform and providing policy prescriptions that would better enable agencies to fulfil their regulatory missions. Focusing primarily on the differing requirements for both corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises in North America and Europe, the book aims to complement existing initiatives and to expand knowledge of regulatory reform by showing: how existing experience can best be put to practical use "on the ground"; by drawing lessons from experiments in innovative regulation internationally; by reporting and extrapolating on original case studies; and by advancing understanding on which instruments and strategies are likely to be of most value and why. The authors argue that the development of theory has outstripped its application. In essence, Leaders and Laggards aims to ground a myriad of theory on the reinvention of environmental regulation into practice. The book will be essential reading for environmental policy-makers, regulatory and other government officials responsible for policy design and implementation, academics and postgraduate students in environmental management, environmental law and environmental policy, and a more general readership within environmental policy and management studies. It will also be of interest to those in industry, such as environmental managers and corporate strategists, who are considering the use of more innovative environmental and regulatory strategies, and to environmental NGOs.

Drawing from experience internationally, on recent and important developments in regulatory theory, and upon models and approaches constructed during the author's empirical research, this book addresses the question: how can law influence the internal self-regulation of organisations in order to make them more responsive to occupational health and safety concerns? In this context, it is argued that Occupational Health and Safety management systems have the potential to stimulate models of self-organisation within firms in such a way as to make them self-reflective and to encourage informal self-critical reflection about their occupational health and safety performance. This book argues for a two track system of regulation under which enterprises are offered a choice between a continuation of traditional forms of regulation and the adoption of a safety management system-based approach on the other. The book concludes with a discussion of the use of criminal and administrative sanctions to provide organisations with incentives to adopt effective Occupational Health and Safety management systems. The book proposes a wider range of criminal sanctions and sentencing guidelines to ensure employers receive sentencing discounts where they have introduced effective management systems.