The Role of Government in Environmental Management

Environmental policy management

Management for sustainable development requires the integration of environmental, economic and social policies. It is often difficult to predict precisely how various environmental and economic factors may interact. Policy makers, therefore, need to fully comprehend not only the range and complexity of environmental problems but their interrelatedness with economic and social ones. Moreover, policy makers may be called upon to make decisions on issues where there is no clear knowledge or where scientists actually disagree regarding possible outcomes. This draws attention to the need for policy makers and managers to think methodically about issues that previously were perceived as lying outside their immediate purview. Governmental legislation and regulatory requirements largely have provided the context for environmental management. Presently, responses to environmental concerns frequently have entailed the creation and adoption of environmental legislation and the establishment of a variety of enforcement mechanisms. These legislative and regulatory efforts to control environmental degradation have often been less than successful for a variety of reasons, including the adoption of overly ambitious provisions, and/or insufficient institutional support for their enforcement. Robert Paehlke contends that although protective regulation to date has been the policy tool of choice, an array of other policy instruments is available.2 ) He identifies three types of non-regulatory approaches which may, in some circumstances, be more appropriate or serve as useful supplements to protective regulation. These are indirect, participatory, and authoritative approaches. Paehlke distinguishes between competitive or economic regulation on the one hand, and social or protective regulation on the other. His paper asserts that a wider array of policy instruments should be used within the realm now occupied by protective regulation. Indirect approaches include such actions as mandatory beverage container deposit legislation and appliance efficiency standards. Participatory approaches involve passing along the task of policy implementation to non-governmental structures such as in the case of internal responsibility systems that seek to protect workplace health through mandatory workplace committees and protected worker rights. Authoritative approaches would include such activities as banning the production or sale of particularly hazardous substances. Still other enforcement mechanisms have been identified which may be instrumental in making environmental policies effective. One such mechanism is ethical persuasion, which seeks to alter the preference functions of producers and consumers. In addition, governments have a variety of economic regulatory mechanisms at their disposal with which to affect environmental outcomes. These include taxation, and expenditure and debt management policies. Although the importance of sound environmental management is ever more widely recognized, measures to protect or enhance the environment still must compete with more traditional objectives of government policy. The benefits of enhancing the environment are often difficult to define and measuring economic gains from investing in environment is complicated by the fact that many of the benefits cannot be evaluated in markets, or their effects are spread out over longer periods of time. For example, it is difficult to quantify, in economic terms, costs such as resource depletion, or public health deterioration, or benefits such as clean air and water or protection of endangered species. In general terms, the relevance of benefits and cost estimation to policy-making is clear. Although it is not possible to measure all benefits and costs in monetary terms, there are decided advantages in measuring these wherever possible. In this connection, methodologies for environmental impact assessment, social cost-benefit analysis, environmental accounting and integrated physical planning are all being further developed and refined as tools for environmental decision-making. A number of other elements are necessary for successful environmental management. One such element is an environmental management information system, with capacity for data analysis and interpretation, to provide adequate and timely dissemination of information to policy formulators and decision makers. The growing concern with environmental issues has created and increasing demand for a broad range of environment statistics and indicators, including integrated environmental and economic accounting information. While some countries like the United States have well established programs for environment statistics, in many other cases, such as Korea, such programs, per se, do not exist.