Informational Regulation of Environmental Risks

Abstract

This paper examines the law and economics of informational regulation (IR) of environmental risks. Informational regulation here means regulation which provides to affected stakeholders information on the operations of regulated entities, usually with the expectation that such stakeholders will then exert pressure on these entities to comply with regulations in a manner which serves the interests of stakeholders. As such, IR reinforces and augments direct regulatory monitoring and enforcement through third‐party monitoring and incentives. The paper provides two contrasting frameworks, from law and economics, to analyze the costs and benefits likely to arise from IR and concludes with a discussion of the appropriate scope of IR as a substitute for and complement of traditional environmental regulation and law.

Sustainable Operations Management: An Enduring Stream, or Passing Fancy?

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An implementation assessment of China's Environmental Information Disclosure Decree

“…It was only in the mid-1990s that information disclosure, right-to-know, and environmental reporting obligations were interpreted as having positive environmental governance effects (Kakkainen, 2001;Stewart, 2001;Mol, 2006). In the legal, economic and sociological American and international literature, the influence of the wider availability of environmental information on environmental policy-making and regulatory processes has been brought together under the notion of informational regulation or informational governance (Konar and Cohen, 1997;Tietenberg, 1998;Kleindorfer and Orts, 1999;Case, 2001;Mol, 2006). With informational regulation or governance, standard conventional regulatory practices in many countries, such as standard setting, licensing, and enforcement, are complemented or partly replaced by new informational dynamics in which other non-state actors play a significant role: "regulation by revelation" (Tietenberg and Wheeler, 1998;Florini, 2003;Burg, 2006).…”

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