Industrial Innovation and Environmental Regulation: Developing Workable Solutions

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What role should governments play in protecting the environment and controlling the environmental impacts of industry? Do regulations benefit the environment? And how do they affect industrial innovation? Since the early 1970s, regulations have been used to coerce producers of goods and services into internalizing the environmental costs of production. These efforts have often faced opposition on practical and ideological grounds. Beginning in the 1980s, there has been a movement toward liberalization, coupled with the continued failure of the market to protect the environment as a public good. As a result, private and public sector interests have been debating the appropriate role of governments in protecting and improving the environment and controlling the environmental impact of industry. Using case studies from numerous countries, this book examines political and industrial trends and the responses to these challenges. The authors conclude that the complexities of environmental and economic relationships disallow universal solutions, and they stress the need for context-specific perspectives on the role of regulatory measures in environmental innovation.

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Page 140 - A national system of innovation is that set of distinct institutions which jointly and individually contribute to the development and diffusion of new technologies and which provides the framework within which governments form and implement policies to influence the innovation process. As such it is a system of interconnected institutions to create, store and transfer the knowledge, skills and artefacts which define new technologies.
Page 227 - society" in general in that it involves citizens acting collectively in a public sphere to express their interests, passions, and ideas, exchange information, achieve mutual goals, make demands on the state, and hold state officials accountable.
Page 136 - Bruce (ed.). Getting It Green: Case Studies in Canadian Environmental Regulation, Policy Study 12 (November 1990).
Page 110 - ... environmental regulation produces not just less pollution, but also creates better-performing or higher-quality products, safer products, lower product costs (perhaps from material substitution or less packaging), products with higher resale or scrap value (because of ease in recycling or disassembly) or lower costs of product disposal for users. Process offsets occur when environmental regulation not only leads to reduced pollution, but also results in higher resource productivity such as higher...
Page 23 - Cleaner production is the continuous application of an integrated preventive environmental strategy to processes and products to reduce risks to humans and the environment. For production processes, cleaner production includes conserving raw materials and energy, eliminating toxic raw materials and reducing the quantity and toxicity of all emissions and wastes before they leave a process.
Page 6 - A breakthrough phase where visible structural changes take place through an accumulation of socio-cultural, economic, ecological and institutional changes that react to each other. During the acceleration phase, there are collective learning processes, diffusion and embedding processes.
Page 44 - Otherwise expressed, the main secret of Taiwan's development is not here her ability to meet the technological requirements for increasingly productive gadgets, but her ability to meet the organizational requirements of new combinations and mechanization of mutually helpful behavior necessary to achieve the gadgets of progress.
Page 214 - Scandinavian companies developed innovative pulping and bleaching technologies that not only met emission requirements but also lowered operating costs. Even though the United States was the first to regulate, US companies were unable to realize any first-mover advantages because US regulations ignored a critical principle of good environmental regulation: Create maximum opportunity for innovation by letting industries discover how to solve their own...

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