Environmental regulation, governance, and policy instruments, 20 years after the stick, carrot, and sermon typology

ABSTRACT

In 1998, Evert Vedung posited a typology of policy instruments making governing akin to a conversation with a donkey: regulatory (sticks), economic (carrots) and information-based (sermons) instruments. Kathryn Harrison later applied this typology to pollution control in her popular ‘Talking with the Donkey’ piece. Though command-and-control instruments were central up until the late 1990s, growing global interest in ‘New Environmental Policy Instruments’ (NEPI) led to a disinterest in regulatory mechanisms and an increase in attention to information-based and economic instruments. Are governments using regulation as a policy instrument now more than before or are they choosing policy mixes? In this paper, I examine the state of the art regarding regulation as an environmental policy instrument by exploring whether the apparent shift to NEPI did reduce interest in environmental regulation as a policy instrument. I find that policy experiments with models of policy instruments led to increased interest in policy instrument mixes. Evidence from a systematic review of JEPP scholarship and a broader scholarly review of the literature on environmental policy instruments over the past 20 years focused on drinking water and solid waste governance suggest that policy mixes might work best when faced with conditions of uncertainty and governance complexity.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental regulation
• policy instruments
• instrument choice
• governance
• policy mixes

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega is an Assistant Professor in the Public Administration Division of the Center for Economic Teaching and Research (Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, CIDE) in Mexico. He is a specialist in comparative public policy and focuses on North American environmental politics, primarily sanitation and water governance, solid waste management, neoinstitutional theory, transnational environmental social movements and experimental methods in public policy. Dr. Pacheco-Vega's current research programme focuses on the spatial, political and human dimensions of public service delivery from a comparative perspective. He is Past Editor for the Americas of the International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Associate Editor of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (JESS), Assistant Editor for Policy Design and Practice, and sits on the editorial board of Water International, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Global Environmental Politics, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, Regions and Cohesion, International Studies Review, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, and Politics, Groups & Identities.

Notes

1 Suggestions from two anonymous reviewers helped me rethink the entire paper and thus I rewrote it in the way shown now. I thank these reviewers for helping me think through the ideas I wanted to showcase in the original paper and for offering helpful hints and suggestions that I took to heart in this rewriting of the original manuscript.

2 The search strategy I used was the following: https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?start=90&q=%22policy±instruments%22±%22environmental±regulation%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

3 Search strategy used: in:title=(‘policy instruments’ AND ‘environmental regulation’) in Google Scholar, narrowed from 2000 to 2020.

4 An extensive overview of cases in economic instruments for water protection was developed by the OECD https://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/pdf/cases_table_by_tool.pdf

5 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of this point.