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Gunningham, Neil --- "Environmental Regulation and Non-State Law: The Future Public Policy Agenda" [2008] ELECD 309; in van Schooten, Hanneke; Verschuuren, Jonathan (eds), "International Governance and Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: International Governance and Law

Editor(s): van Schooten, Hanneke; Verschuuren, Jonathan

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847207272

Section: Chapter 7

Section Title: Environmental Regulation and Non-State Law: The Future Public Policy Agenda

Author(s): Gunningham, Neil

Number of pages: 20

Extract:

7. Environmental regulation and non-
state law: the future public policy
agenda
Neil Gunningham

1. INTRODUCTION

Over the last decade, considerable thinking has gone into the issue of how
to design more efficient and effective regulation. Much of this thinking has
been in the field of social regulation and that of environmental regulation
in particular. While not all the innovations and insights that have emerged
from a radical re-conception of the roles of environmental regulation have
broad application to other fields of regulation, nevertheless, many of them
do. This chapter draws from the writer's previous work on this area and
seeks to identify some broad themes and insights based around the themes
of `smart regulation' and regulatory reconfiguration (see in particular
Gunningham and Sinclair 2002, Ch. 9) and their broader connection with
non-state law.
The chapter reviews the changing role of the regulatory state, and the
evolution of a number of next generation policy instruments, intended to
overcome, or at least to mitigate, the considerable problems associated with
previous policy initiatives, and traditional forms of regulation in particu-
lar. The goal is, in the words of the US Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) `to adapt, improve and expand the diversity of our environmental
strategies' (ibid) and to address the circumstances not only of laggards but
also of leaders.
However, policy reform has taken place in what is, in many respects, a
hostile political and economic environment. The 1980s and 1990s saw a
resurgence of free-market ideology which, ...