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Self-regulation

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Pledging, Populism, And The Paris Agreement: The Paradox Of A Management-Based Approach To Global Governance, Cary Coglianese Jan 2019

Pledging, Populism, And The Paris Agreement: The Paradox Of A Management-Based Approach To Global Governance, Cary Coglianese

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For many observers, the Paris Agreement signaled a historic breakthrough in addressing the problem of global warming. In its basic design, however, the Agreement is far from novel. Its dependence on each nation’s self-determined pledge to reduce greenhouse gases mirrors the domestic policy strategy called management-based regulation—a flexible regulatory approach that has been used to address problems as varied as food safety and toxic air pollution. In this article, I connect insights from research on management-based regulation to the international governance of climate change. Unfortunately, management-based regulation’s track-record at the domestic level gives little reason to expect that the Paris …


Motivating Without Mandates: The Role Of Voluntary Programs In Environmental Governance, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash Jan 2016

Motivating Without Mandates: The Role Of Voluntary Programs In Environmental Governance, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash

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For the last several decades, governments around the world have tried to use so-called voluntary programs to motivate private firms to act proactively to protect the environment. Unlike conventional environmental regulation, voluntary programs offer businesses flexibility to adopt cost-effective measures to reduce environmental impacts. Rather than prodding firms to act through threats of enforcement, they aim to entice firms to move forward by offering various kinds of positive incentives, ranging from public recognition to limited forms of regulatory relief. Despite the theoretical appeal of voluntary programs, their proper role in government’s environmental toolkit depends on the empirical evidence of how …


Government Clubs: Theory And Evidence From Voluntary Environmental Programs, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash Dec 2008

Government Clubs: Theory And Evidence From Voluntary Environmental Programs, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established numerous voluntary environmental programs over the last fifteen years, seeking to encourage businesses to make environmental progress beyond what current law requires them to achieve. EPA aims to induce beyond-compliance behavior by offering various forms of recognition and rewards, including relief from otherwise applicable environmental regulations. Despite EPA's emphasis on voluntary programs,relatively few businesses have availed themselves of these programs -- and paradoxically, the programs that offer the most significant regulatory benefits tend to have the fewest members. We explain this paradox by focusing on (a) how programs'membership screening corresponds with membership …


Evaluating The Social Effects Of Environmental Leadership Programs, Jonathan C. Borck, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash Oct 2008

Evaluating The Social Effects Of Environmental Leadership Programs, Jonathan C. Borck, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash

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In the past decade, EPA and over 20 states have created voluntary environmental leadership programs designed to recognize and reward businesses that take steps that go beyond compliance with the strictures of environmental law. Environmental leadership programs seek not only to spur direct improvements to environment quality but also to advance broader social goals that may lead indirectly to environmental improvements, such as improving business-government relationships and changing business culture. Measuring progress toward leadership programs’ social goals is a particularly challenging but essential task if researchers and decision makers are to understand the full impacts of these programs. In this …


Environmental Leadership Programs: Toward An Empirical Assessment Of Their Performance*, Jonathan C. Borck, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash Jan 2008

Environmental Leadership Programs: Toward An Empirical Assessment Of Their Performance*, Jonathan C. Borck, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash

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Over the past decade, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and states have developed environmental leadership programs (ELPs), a type of voluntary environmental program designed to recognize facilities with strong environmental performance records and encourage facilities to perform better. Proponents argue that ELPs overcome some of the limitations of traditional environmental regulation by encouraging managers to address the full gamut of environmental problems posed by their facilities, reducing the costs of environmental regulation, easing adversarialism, and fostering positive culture change. Although ELPs have been in place for at least five years at the federal level and in seventeen states, these …


Introduction To Regulation And Regulatory Processes, Cary Coglianese, Robert Kagan Jun 2007

Introduction To Regulation And Regulatory Processes, Cary Coglianese, Robert Kagan

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Regulation of business activity is nearly as old as law itself. In the last century, though, the use of regulation by modern governments has grown markedly in both volume and significance, to the point where nearly every facet of today’s economy is subject to some form of regulation. When successful, regulation can deliver important benefits to society; however, regulation can also impose undue costs on the economy and, when designed or implemented poorly, fail to meet public needs at all. Given the importance of sound regulation to society, its study by scholars of law and social science is also of …