2. Alternative Approaches to Environmental Management

This chapter examines the main approaches to environmental management. Command and control approaches involve standards, monitoring and enforcement of penalties by public agencies. In the last few decades it has frequently been argued that such approaches impose too many costs on both government agencies and the organisations being regulated. This has resulted in the advocacy of economic instruments which focus on an economy’s overall environmental condition rather than the performance of each economic actor. Although New Zealand has introduced an emissions trading scheme it continues to be criticised by the OECD for not making sufficient use of economic instruments. Voluntary approaches to environmental management use a mix of social marketing, education, incentives and community pressure to make organisations address their environmental impacts and to help safeguard environmental resources. Two contrasting ways of explaining policy selection are: (i) normative guidance based on the understanding of the ­conditions in which each type of policy approach is judged most effective; (ii) a political economy perspective that examines how choices have actually been made.