19. Trends in environmental governance: Evidence from seventeen countries and sundry reflections thereon

In virtually all developed countries, though to a varying degree, the 1970s have seen the concrete appearance and the spread of environmental poli-cies. With a lag of about a decade, developing countries have undergone a similar process but with less intensity, reflecting local circumstances of other urgently felt priorities of human development. Air and water pollu-tion have typically been the prime objectives of regulation. An awareness of the complexity of the interactions between economic activities and eco-logical systems and the consequent need for integrated sustainable devel-opment strategies, however, required another two decades before finding a place on the policy agenda. An examination of the development of gover-nance structures for environmental protection in the 17 countries included in our sample allowed us to bring to light differences and peculiarities, a few interesting trends, and a number of remaining challenges. 1 ECOLOGICAL MODERNIZATION AND MARKET-BASED INSTRUMENTS A need for ‘ecological modernization’, intended as a shift from command-and-control policy tools towards both voluntary approaches and market-based instruments, is perceived in most countries. Interestingly, even China has experimented with several market-based tools, which have grown in importance along with the ‘socialist market economy ’ reform process. The call for such a shift is usually motivated by concerns regarding both the effectiveness and the cost efficiency of more traditional environmental policy instruments. In Germany, in the 1990s, command-and-contro