Motivational Underpinnings of Command-and-Control, Market-Based, and Voluntarist Environmental Policies

Historically, regulatory command-and-control schemes have dominated the environmental policy process. Recently, market-based incentives and voluntarist programs have begun to compete with regulatory policies. We argue in this article that policymakers must distinguish these strategies by their motivational underpinnings. While each strategy attempts to achieve the same goal, behavioral or organizational change that reduces pollution and/or provides environmental protection, each strategy is distinct in its means. We discuss how command-and-control capitalizes on fear, market-based incentives capitalize on greed, and voluntarism on one's sense of social responsibility. We discuss the implications of choosing each of these policy alternatives by drawing on the insights of "social dilemmas" research that analyzes situations in which the individual and the collective good are in conflict.