Green alliances: conflict or cooperation in environmental policy

Environmental partnerships (“green alliances”) between NGOs and business, provide an additional policy option which can make a variety of contributions to environmental protection and ultimately, to sustainable development. Yet despite the potential policy significance of such partnerships, our knowledge of, what works and what doesn't work, and or how best to design such partnerships, remains very limited. From our own empirical work and from the broader analytical and empirical literature, we seek to identify the circumstances in which such partnerships can most beneficially be formed, their major commercial and environmental benefits, and the design factors which will influence their success. As we will demonstrate, environmental partnerships provide an additional policy option which can make a variety of contributions to environmental protection and ultimately, to sustainable development. Yet despite the potential policy significance of such partnerships, our knowledge of, what works and what doesn't work, and or how best to design such partnerships, both as free standing arrangements, and more importantly, in combination with complementary policy instruments, remains very limited. For example, even in Europe, where some forms of environmental partnership have been in place for some years, our knowledge of how they perform and why, is still far too limited. Although a body of empirical evidence is beginning to build, the jury is still very much out on these questions. And much of the evidence that is in, (which relates mainly to the industrial sector and to the "first generation" of environmental partnerships, OECD, 1999), suggests that many of these partnerships may be seriously under-performing and that the “second generation” of such instruments needs to be much more carefully designed if it is to achieve its efficiency and effectiveness goals. Against this backdrop, this article draws from the existing literature and our own empirical work to examine the nature and value of evolving partnership initiatives between NGOs and business