The Importance of Regulation-Induced Innovation for Sustainable Development

Abstract

This article explores the complex relationship between environmental regulation, innovation, and sustainable development within the context of an increasingly globalizing economy. The economic development, environment, and employment aspects of sustainable development are emphasized. We contend that the most crucial problem in achieving sustainability is lock-in or path dependency due to (1) the failure to envision, design, and implement policies that achieve co-optimization, or the mutually reinforcing, of social goals, and (2) entrenched economic and political interests that gain from the present system and advancement of its current trends. The article argues that industrial policy, environmental law and policy, and trade initiatives must be ‘opened up’ by expanding the practice of multi-purpose policy design, and that these policies must be integrated as well. Sustainable development requires stimulating revolutionary technological innovation through environmental, health, safety, economic, and labor market regulation. Greater support for these changes must also be reinforced by ‘opening up the participatory and political space’ to enable new voices to contribute to integrated thinking and solutions

Environmental Sustainability: A Case of Policy Implementation Failure?

“…The majority of these studies cited insufficient incentives to adopt environmentally sustainable practices as a trap and argued for greater economic incentives [30,32,38,42,45,55,63,66,67,69,74,75,83,84,95,102,117]. Some found that there were insufficient incentives to implement a policy or comply with regulations as a result of either a lack of official accountability or a lack of public demand for action [34,36,48,54,60,82,87,108,109]. Toke [82], for example, found that local communities received little direct benefit from windfarms in the UK and Denmark, resulting in a lack of incentive for their support.…”

“…This may be the case for a single agency [31,35,37,45,46,48,60,90,93,102,104] or policies that require a multi-level or multi-sector approach to implementation [36,48,51,59,74,77,98,99,109,110,112]. Finally, problems also occur when the chain of responsibility for implementing a policy is unclear [41,48,61,74].…”

“…Some authors pointed to the absence of appropriate laws [32,48,53,59,61,71,74,88,92,99,[108][109][110][111]. In other circumstances, legislation was present but either inadequate or not enforced [36,43,45,46,51,53,62,67,74,109,112].…”

Environmental Regulation, Economic Network and Sustainable Growth of Urban Agglomerations in China

“…Friendly economic growth emphasizes the importance of protecting the environment, and the coordinated economic development of urban agglomeration concerns the development gap among cities in urban agglomerations [17,18]. This paper employs spatial econometric methods and social network analysis in the GIS environment, in order to reveal the impact of environmental regulation on economic growth as well as the spillover effects due to disparity in environmental regulation.…”

Avaliação Ambiental Estratégica E Auditoria Contábil Ambiental Como Instrumentos Para a Otimização Da Política Pública Ambiental No Brasil

“…Vários estudos têm mostrado que quando a avaliação de impactos integra três fatores, quais sejam, econômico, social [particularmente saúde] e ambiental, como é o caso da avaliação de impacto da sustentabilidade [AIS], os impactos econômicos recebem mais atenção que os sociais e os ambientais (Morrisson--Saunders & Fischer, 2006;Smith, Fooks, Collin, Weishaar, & Gilmore, 2010), sendo um dos problemas cruciais para atingir a sustentabilidade o fato de que os interesses econômicos [e políticos] prevalecem no sistema atual e permanecem à frente do avanço de suas tendências sociais e ambientais (Ashford & Hall, 2011). Devido a essa realidade, para Morrisson-Saunders e Fischer (2006), a proteção do ambiente biofí-sico, mediante AIA e AAE, deve permanecer específica para esse fim.…”