When Are Private Environmental Regimes Effective and Why?

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, private environmental regimes have spread across global markets and penetrated local industries around the world, from forestry to fish farms, mining to automakers. By pushing their standards along supply chains and using market and peer pressures to promote their use, regime administrators hope to bring about higher standards of practice more efficiently and effectively than governments can through the traditional tools of public regulation. However, in the eyes of critics, these voluntary regimes do little to change actual practices on the ground, or if they do create change it benefits giant transnational firms and increases their competitive advantages in global markets. Indeed, disagreement over whether and when these regimes are effective often spills over into larger debates over the environmental and economic trade-offs inherent in global economic integration.