Environmental Law: Drowning in ineffective Legislation

Abstract

The pursuit of sustainability is generating many new approaches - market instruments and incentives being the most obvious. In the economic literature these are often discussed as 'non-regulatory'and seen as inherently more efficient. This paper looks at the changing role of regulation in this new reality of strategies that rely increasingly on markets, and less and less on traditional policing and administration.It considers environmental regulation within a behavioural systems framework, and examines how different instruments work, and their social and policy implications. It considers optimal strategies.Having done so, the paper considers 'what is the role of law in each of these instrument types?' and then 'what would efficiency of regulation mean for each of these uses?'Finally the paper proposes some directions for legal scholarship.