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New Environmental Policy Instruments (NEPIs) are becoming increasingly attractive. From a global perspective, there has been a rapid diffusion of these market-based, voluntary or informational instruments. This article examines the spread of four different NEPIs -eco-labels, energy or carbon taxes, national environmental policy plans or strategies for sustainable development, and free-access-of-information (FAI) provisions. The adoption of NEPIs by national policy makers is not simply a reaction to newly emerging environmental problems or to real or perceived deficits of traditional command and control regulation, rather the use of NEPIs can also be ascribed to the inner dynamics of international processes of policy transfer or policy diffusion. These processes make it increasingly difficult for national policy makers to ignore new approaches in environmental policy that have already been put into practice in 'forerunner' countries.

During the 1990s, a new regulatory pattern in domestic environmental policy making emerged. This pattern is largely a result of policy diffusion. In the absence of formal obligations, regulatory instruments that have been communicated internationally and were already being practiced elsewhere were voluntarily emulated and adopted by policy makers. While the international promotion of regulatory instruments often facilitated their diffusion, the instruments’ characteristics determined the extent and speed by which regulatory instruments spread across countries. The voluntary adoption of regulatory instruments cannot be exclusively explained by the rational motivation of policy makers to improve effectiveness. In addition, they were motivated by concerns of legitimacy and perceived pressure to conform with international norms.

The article gives an empirical overview of the international spread of 22 environmental policy innovations. The policy innovations examined in the article include administrative institutions (e.g. environmental ministries, scientific advisory bodies), laws (e.g. soil protection laws, packaging waste laws), instruments of environmental policy integration (e.g. national environmental policy plans, environmental impact assessment), energy taxes and eco-labels. On this empirical basis, recurring patterns in the global spread of environmental policy innovations are identified and linked to specific causal mechanisms through which this change occurs. In particular, the paper demonstrates how and to what extent non-obligatory diffusion, legal harmonization and coercive imposition matter as mechanisms of global environmental policy convergence.

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