Voluntary Environmental AgreementsVoluntary Environmental Agreements • February 27th, 2012
The conventional approach to environmental control and regulation is to establish laws. Voluntary regulation, by contrast, provides incentives – but not mandates – for this control. Voluntary Environmental Agreements (VEAs) are agreements among the corporate, government and/or non-profit sectors, not required by legislation, that aim to improve environmental quality or natural resource utilization. These agreements are diversified and incorporate various kinds of objectives, incentives and procedures.
VOLUNTARY AGREEMENTS FOR THE ACHIEVEMENT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS: DUTCH GREEN DEALS AND WRAP AGREEMENTSVoluntary Environmental Agreements • December 2nd, 2016
Voluntary Environmental Agreements and Competition Policy The Case of Germany’s Private System for Packaging Waste RecyclingVoluntary Environmental Agreements • October 30th, 2000
By analyzing Germany’s voluntary Dual Management System for Packaging Waste Collection and Recycling (DSD), the paper highlights two aspects crucial for assessing voluntary environmental agreements from an antitrust viewpoint. First, specific features of DSD’s governance structure are argued to mitigate anticompetitive effects stemming from centralization, and to improve management performance, aspects which have so far been neglected in the German discussion. Other features identified in the debate as hampering competition are shown to have an economic rationale from the viewpoint of the neoinstitutional theory of the firm. Hence, the institutional fine- tuning of a voluntary agreement matters when assessing its implications for market competition. Second, it is shown that the emergence of DSD is the result of a basic principle of German waste management policy. This principle formed the regulatory threat in the negotiations that ultimately led to the implementation of DSD. By present
