Environmental Policy and Sustainable Development

Abstract

With changing and mounting pressures on environmental resources due to economic and demographic developments, environmental policymaking is a wide and continuously growing field. The birth hour of modern environmental policymaking is the 1950s and 1960s, with the United States (US) as a pioneer country in adopting the first instruments for resource protection and combating pollution (Andrews 2006). Around the same time, environmental movements became visible in terms of mobilization and organization (Ruckelshaus 1985), although the origins and philosophical foundations of such movements date back to the fifteenth century (Kline 2011). Similarly, environmental economics, as one of the main instruments of environmental policy analysis, was acknowledged as a scientific field during the 1960s, although the economic analysis of environmental problems had been under way for at least two centuries before (Sandmo 2015).

Since these early days of environmental policy, the topics and analysis tools have advanced greatly in order to keep up with new knowledge on environmental issues. The concerns of policymakers and scientists moved beyond resource protection and pollution to cover issues such as resource-use efficiency, problems with common-pool resources, renewable resources, intergenerational equity, and incorporating environmental issues into a wider understanding of sustainable development. Environmental policies were thus transformed from a simply command-and-control perspective toward efficiency-based reforms and later, the more recent issues of integrated approaches toward community and sustainable development (Mazmanian and Kraft 2009). The rise of ecological economics, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, has contributed to an increasing number of tools to address the broad issues of environmental policies. Ecological economics adopted a diversified perspective and broadened the neoclassical approach of environmental economics, leading to pluralism of approaches and policy tools (Venkatachalam 2007). Nowadays, environmental policy is a rich field of investigation and an integral part of public policy. This chapter introduces this field in relation to sustainable development. It outlines the key elements required to define environmental policies and briefly explains the history of issues related to sustainable development. Later, it explains the tools and instruments used as inputs into environmental policies. Finally, it discusses key terms and concepts for analyzing the process, performance, and impacts of environmental policies.