LIST OF PANELS

The objective of this panel is to bring together scholars working in a variety of methodological traditions and jurisdictions to learn from each other about new ways of conceptualizing environmental policy instruments. Ultimately, the goals are to move the study of environmental policy instruments beyond the traditional typologies and to cross fertilize two research agendas that are currently somewhat disconnected: the study of the relationship between policy instruments and governance modes; and the study of the effectiveness of different instruments and instrument mixes.

Perhaps more so than in other policy sectors, environmental policy has often been rather simply characterized as the adoption (or failure to adopt) certain kinds of of policy instruments.  From “licensing and permitting” to standard setting, from carbon taxes to output-based allowances there has been an almost universal tendency to focus on solutions rather than problems and to group these solutions in rather simple ways using familiar typologies. 

Two, largely unrelated, developments are pushing students of environmental policy beyond these classification exercises.  One is the attempt to explain instrument choice and the persistence of particular instruments as the product of particular governance arrangements; the other is the study of the effectiveness of instruments in actually improving environmental quality or mitigating damage. In both cases, researchers have been pushed to think about policy instruments differently. In the former case, for example, by considering how notionally similar instruments may behave very differently in different institutional contexts; in the latter case, in considering how similar instruments may differ across dimensions such as intensity or density.   Many of the more vexing questions raised by treating policy instruments this way – uncertainty about the dependent variable, vagueness about units of analysis, competing conceptualization of dimensions – have received careful treatment in studies from which researchers working in one field could learn from the other how to advance their own research agenda and even hold out the possibility of a synthesis of output and outcome based studies of environmental policy instruments.

The objective of this panel is to bring together scholars working in a variety of methodological traditions and jurisdictions to learn from each other about new ways of conceptualizing environmental policy instruments. Perhaps more so than in other policy sectors, environmental policy has often been rather simply characterized as the adoption (or failure to adopt) certain kinds of of policy instruments.  This may be because problem definitions such as greenhouse gas mitigation or sustainable development are relatively uncontested goals of environmental policy (as opposed to disagreements about the urgency or feasibility of tackling these problems in practice).  Whatever the reason, the effect has been to focus attention on how to study the adoption, persistence and effectiveness of particular environmental policy instruments, often in very innovative ways compared with the study of policy instruments in other policy sectors.

We invite papers that illustrate new ways of thinking about environmental policy instruments beyond the traditional broad classifications derived from the familiar typologies:  market versus information or authoritative versus expenditure, for example.  We are particularly interested in receiving proposals that consider the influence of specific institutional contexts or governance modes  on the selection and/or performance of environmental policy instruments; papers which involve the conceptualization of different dimensions of instrument characteristics; papers which focus on the selection and/or use of indicators to measure instrument effectiveness (either institutional selection, such as the indicators that accompany the UN Sustainable Development Goals, for example, or analytical selection); papers which focus on problems of measurement and the construction of indices; and papers which seek to link instrument characteristics or the characteristics of instrument mixes to environmental outcomes or performance more generally.  Comparative papers are particularly welcome but individual case studies will also be considered.  Papers employing qualitative, quantitative and hybrid methods are equally welcome.