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Environmental Information Directive, the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control
Directive and the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme Regulation were the result of this
new regulatory approach and all were proposed and/or heavily promoted by the UK
government. Taken together these policies reflected the British preference for procedural
legislation that creates incentives for industrial polluters to curb their impact on the
environment rather than mandating that they do so. The legislation sought to take a more
holistic and flexible approach to industrial permitting procedures, give firms incentives to
improve their environmental performance beyond what is required by law and to enroll the
help of the market and society in the oversight of corporate behavior.
The reasons for the UK government’s changed attitude towards environmental
policy as well as its success in promoting its ideas within the EU and abroad are multiple
and have been well documented in the literature (Golub 1996, Haigh 1995, Heritier, Knill
and Mingers 1996, Lowe and Ward 1998). As mentioned above, perhaps the most
important reason has been the very conscious effort that all UK governments since 1988
have made in trying to influence EU policy in an effort to avoid the painful adjustment
costs imposed by the European environmental policies of the 1980s. Additionally the
success of these efforts can be related to the global rise of neo-liberal ideas during the
1990s and the consequent meshing of the environmental voluntary movement with Blair’s
third way policy agenda. By the early 1990s when European economies were beginning to
stall, the Commission also felt it was necessary to experiment with less costly and
purportedly more market friendly policy instruments that rely more on private and less on
government authority. All of these forces combined to make the 1990s a decade of British
environmental policy influence.
This paper seeks to address a question that the literature has not examined in as
much depth, namely what are the policy outcomes of this newfound British influence.
Although these new EU policies reflect the UK’s traditional approach to environmental
regulation, many contain new instruments, the effectiveness of which have not been
explored in much depth. More specifically the paper seeks to address this question of
outcomes by examining the effects and effectiveness of what is probably the UK’s most
successful policy export, voluntary environmental management standards (EMS). EMS
schemes are voluntary codes of conduct in which firms can participate by pledging to make
Convention