Environmental regulation in the twenty-first century: a systematic review of (and critical research agenda for) JEPP scholarship

ABSTRACT

Statutory and other forms of government-led environmental regulation (further ‘environmental regulation’) have evolved considerably since the mid-twentieth century. However, JEPP scholarship has shown little engagement with these developments over the last two decades. This lack of attention is unwarranted because environmental regulation is still a dominant approach to achieving the goals of environmental policy and planning. This article seeks to map, explore and evaluate current JEPP engagement with environmental regulations; explore three of the major developments in statutory and other forms of government-led regulation over the last decades relevant to environmental policy and planning; and present an environmental regulation research agenda for future JEPP scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental regulation
• statutory regulation
• regulatory governance
• review
• research agenda
• socio-legal

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the New Zealand Government Regulatory Practice Initiative (G-REG) for financial support. Many thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Jeroen van der Heijden is Professor of Public Governance and Chair in Regulatory Practice at the School of Government, Victoria University (New Zealand) and Honorary Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University (Australia). His research is concerned with innovations in urban climate governance in the Global North and Global South.

Notes

1 All volumes have been included in the review up until Volume 21, Issue 6. Book review articles published in JEPP have been left outside the scope of this systematic review. ‘Online first’ articles have been excluded from the review also.

2 Regular editorials are here understood as editorials and introductions to JEPP issues by the editors of the journal. Editorials and introductions to special issues as well as editorial and introductions to regular issues by guest editors are included in the 556 regular JEPP articles explored.

3 The term ‘compliance’ gave the same results as ‘compli*’ and no results were found for ‘comply*’.

4 The column ‘Mentioned as keyword OR in title on n JEPP article(s)’ in table 1 adds up to 32 for terms indicating a possible regulatory focus. Because some articles use multiple keywords indicating a possible regulatory focus or multiple words in their titles, this represents only 21 unique articles.

5 It should be noted that this is by no means a full overview of foundational texts central to the field of regulatory scholarship.

6 A review of how JEPP scholarship has engaged with non-statutory forms of environmental regulation would, of course, make for an excellent research topic as well. Space limits me, unfortunately, to carry it out in this article as well.

7 The three turns in regulation discussed in what follows feature regularly on the pages of the top 15 journals for socio-legal regulatory scholarship (journals that all rank highly in the combined ISI Journal Citation Reports Ranking categories law, political science and public administration): Regulation and Governance, the Journal of Public Administration, Research and Theory (JPART), Law and Policy, Public Administration, Governance, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Public Administration Review, Public Management Review, the Policy Studies Journal, Policy Sciences, Politics and Society, Administrative Science Quarterly, Social and Legal Studies, the Journal of Law and Society, and the International Journal of Law in Context. Readers interested in other turns in and forms of ‘modern’ (environmental) regulation (such as transnational regulation, collaborative regulation, dynamic regulation, experimental regulation, and regulatory stewardship) are strongly recommended to consult these journals. Readers interested in a ‘law and economics’ understanding of regulation or the ‘economics of regulation’ are advised to consult journals such as the Journal of Law and Economics, the International Review of Law and Economics, the Journal of Economic Theory, or the Journal of Regulatory Economics.

8 I should stress, once more, that non-statutory and sometimes non-government-led ‘regulatory’ interventions such as industry environmental self-regulation, voluntary environmental agreements, and environmental regulatory partnerships have been explored on the pages of JEPP.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by New Zealand Government Regulatory Practice Initiative (G-REG).